I agree with bakunin on the premis that clever salemen sell non-technical managers some TIN which is unsuitable for the job. However I cannot totally agree with the statement that all cases of production SHOULD NOT be through VIO served LPAR configuration. I have worked for a number of clients where the large grunt machines running very large Oracle databases were by necessity standalone LPARs with their own resources (network disk etc.) However for the low order LPARs these were configured in a dual VIO server configuration with auto failover of all services (network SSA disk etc.) As long as the network and disk connections are proven and stable then the performance of this configuration were more than adequate.