It also depends on who you are talking to and what the context is. For many people "utilization" is the average CPU usaged over longer periods of time. Something you consider in capacity planning. This is where you size the peak capacity of your LPAR based on the measured avarage capacity. In that aspect, VM is often different from MVS.
To drive a system that busy you need workload. When much of your workload is through jobs that are scheduled in the way to optimize throughput etc, then you may achieve a very high average utilization. If most of your workload comes from end-users who are less easy to control and end up wanting their share during the same office hours, you find your average utilization much lower. This is often what people refer to when they say VM maximum utilization is lower: the typical VM workload is not as easy spread over the full 24 hours of the day. Now discrete servers have it even harder - their workload is for one single application or end-user, and even more likely to have short peaks and long periods of not usage at all. Rob -- Rob van der Heij Velocity Software, Inc http://velocitysoftware.com/
