Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 on IBM POWER8 and x86 in bare metal mode: A comparison

This article demonstrates the similarities and slight differences between installing Linux® on an IBM POWER8 processor-based server and an x86 server in bare metal mode. With the release of Red Hat 7.2 little endian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be installed on POWER8 processor-based servers without any form of virtualization. Once installed, the operating systems (OSs) are identical but the startup process of each hardware manufacturer is a little different. For example, IBM POWER8 uses the Advanced System Management (ASM) interface while most Intel® systems use either integrated management module (IMM) or baseboard management controller (BMC). The new IBM Power Systems™ LC family of servers (based on the POWER8 processor technology) uses BMC, but the IBM Power Systems L series uses ASM. Both POWER8 and x86 processor-based systems allow either GUI or character-based installation using Anaconda, the popular Linux installer. We will demonstrate Anaconda based on POWER8 and GUI based installation on x86. Hopefully this article shows you how easy it is to install Linux on either of the systems.

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