Author Archive
Interoperable Management for Cloud Computing
Posted by Julie Lass in 2:54 PM
Loading ...Today the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) announced it created a new group called the Open Cloud Standards Incubator to work on defining standards to help enable interoperable management of clouds. Many of the key leaders in the cloud computing space committed to collaborating in the Incubator to create standards that will be supported by the industry. You can read more about the announcement here.
This promising development in the cloud computing community helps address end-user concerns about cloud computing. Collaboration among cloud computing leaders can lead to easier management of cloud resources and improve interoperability between disparate private and public clouds.
DMTF is an industry standards group that brings the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. Companies in the DMTF collaborate on management standards because our customers—IT customers—demand that we make our products easier to manage when they are deployed together in their environments. IT administrators do not want to be forced to use separate management tools and processes for each vendor’s product. That’s too complex and expensive.
The need for interoperable management is no different for a cloud computing environment. There are still multiple resources to manage from hardware systems and virtualized platforms to software and applications. In addition, clouds both within an enterprise and publicly available need to interoperate and, to some degree, be managed holistically. In order to make cloud computing easier to adopt and maintain, standards that simplify the management of these resources distributed among different clouds are needed.
Finally, I think the goal in the industry is to make cloud computing more cost effective, reliable and easier to maintain. We can help achieve this goal by putting good standards in place that we all support to simplify managing this complex environment. This standardization can help our customers significantly realize the full benefits of the cloud computing paradigm.
If you are attending Microsoft Management Summit this week you can stop by the DMTF booth (#437) and find out more about the organization and its standards. You can also visit AMD in booth #517 where we’ll be showing you some real-life examples of interoperable management with DMTF DASH.
Valerie K. Kane (@valeriekane) is a senior marketing manager at AMD and VP of Marketing for the DMTF. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Saving the Best for Last
Posted by Julie Lass in 1:30 PM
Hello AMD community, and Happy Virtualization Ecosystems Month! We’re very excited to have been invited to take part in AMD’s celebration of all things “virtualization.” We’ve been technology partners for a long time and it’s great to have this relationship reflected in our blogs and social networking groups. You can see AMD blogging for Parallels here.
As you know, Advanced Micro Devices is all about developing the next generation of computing. Parallels leverages these continued advances in computing power in our innovative software. For instance, there are thousands of web hosters using our server virtualization software, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, because it’s the most efficient method for virtualizing on a wide-scale. These hosters are now more fashionably called cloud providers; a market in which AMD and Parallels have been collaborating since, well… before “cloud computing” was cool.
Containers consume far fewer resources than other virtualization technologies, granting servers higher density and optimized performance: happy servers make for even happier IT professionals. The solutions we provide today wouldn’t be possible without working closely with top technology partners to take advantage of the latest innovations – without the right horsepower and processing architecture, virtualization would never achieve its full potential.
The success of recent industry events such as WebhostingDay 2009 and Parallels Summit 2009 has demonstrated the growing relevance of and interest in cloud computing. This is an exciting prospect for both AMD and Parallels with our long experience with the cloud; we look forward to helping customers evolve their IT infrastructure to be more powerful, easier to manage and – in a struggling global economy – very cost effective.
Here’s to continued success alongside our friends at AMD! Again, don’t forget to check out Margaret Lewis’ guest post at http://blogs.parallels.com/betweenthelines
Bryan Goode is
Vice President of Business Development at Parallels, located in Seattle, WA. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Virtualization Itself Is Not the End-Game – Making Enterprise Software Easier to Deploy, Manage, and Support Is
Posted by Julie Lass in 12:47 PM
As development partners, AMD and Oracle collaborate to take full advantage of industry-leading virtualization technologies which help customers reduce complexity, lower costs, and provide greater levels of flexibility. As part of Virtualization Ecosystem Month, I’m posting on AMD’s blog today to provide real-world examples of how Oracle VM Templates make enterprise software easier to deploy, manage, and support. Likewise, Margaret Lewis of AMD can be found on Oracle’s blog about industry virtualization drivers beyond consolidation.
It is all too easy to get caught up in virtualization itself as the ultimate goal when, in reality, the focus should be on the larger objectives you are trying to accomplish: virtualization is a means to an end, not a solution in- and of-itself. So what should be the goal then? You should be creating a data center where applications are radically simpler to deploy, manage, and support; where as much of the complexity is handled for you. And you should be able to do this without having to compromise on the level of sophistication or power of that solution: you should not have to accept a “dumbed-down” solution just to make deployment easy.
Over the last couple of years, the concept of the “virtual appliance” has been floating around with the idea that you just download software, packaged as a VM, start it up and use it without having to worry about the complexities of making sure all the dependencies are in place and that parameters are all configured, etc. Instead of spending weeks trying to figure out how to install and configure powerful software, you could just start using it. Until recently, the idea has been popular but actual use – at least in the Enterprise – has been fairly limited. Why? Because a complete solution requires virtualization software, operating systems, and applications that are all enterprise class and that can be packaged and distributed as a single, ready-to-go solution. In the absence of comprehensive standards, very few companies or communities have all the necessary components that they can legally distribute, so what has been created to date has mostly been made up of “demo” appliances that have not been suitable for enterprise use, certainly not in production. But that is finally changing.
Oracle is leveraging virtualization as part of a broader strategy to make your entire data center better. Oracle distributes an enterprise-class operating system with Oracle Enterprise Linux along with the broadest portfolio of enterprise software available, all of which is officially certified and supported on Oracle VM server virtualization and management software. This means all of it can be distributed to users packaged as pre-configured virtual machines. We call these Oracle VM Templates and they are packaged and licensed for use in the production enterprise today, not just proof-of-concept VMs comprised of limited functionality components. How would you like to be up and running with a Siebel CRM instance or an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) in about an hour after you download the Template? And how would you feel knowing you were deploying software installed and configured by the experts at Oracle so you know it is complete and reliable (but that you can still fully customize it and save it as an updated Template)? And finally, how would you feel knowing it is all officially supported by a single call to the largest enterprise software company in the world and not simply by a collection of miscellaneous vendors and user forums? A better way to get going faster, easier, and with low risk.
But Oracle VM Templates are not just for Oracle to use. It is technology for users and for the software development community as well. Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux from Oracle are not only open source they are also free and free for redistribution without a contract from Oracle. That means you can build your own Oracle VM Templates, including Oracle Enterprise Linux configured as you like, with your own software and distribute the whole solution at will. No longer are users stuck trying to find an OS that is Enterprise class AND has a free license AND is re-distributable for free AND that has 24×7 global support. Suddenly, enterprise class “appliances”‘ seem real and practical for everyone.
This is what virtualization is about: making your applications easier to deploy, manage, and support up and down the stack. For more on Oracle VM and Templates, see the website at oracle.com/virtualization.
Adam Hawley is Director of Product Management at Oracle and has contributed this guest blog. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Rapid Virtualization Indexing with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
Posted by Julie Lass in 4:10 PM
Hello, my name is Bryon Surace. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team within the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. Today’s announcement by AMD highlighting our two companies’ cooperative development efforts marks another milestone in Microsoft and AMD’s continued efforts to deliver an industry-leading virtualization platform that matches processor enhancement with Hyper-V technology advancements.
Hyper-V, as a feature of Windows Server 2008, relies upon hardware-assisted virtualization, such as AMD-Virtualization (AMD-V). The use of this technology is a design principle of Microsoft’s virtualization architecture that is continuing with the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 (now in beta).
Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, builds upon the solid foundation laid in Windows Server 2008. Of the many virtualization enhancements being made in Release 2, a few of the key features take advantage of advancements included in the newest generation processors.
Specifically Hyper-V, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2, will take full advantage of Second Level Address Translation such as AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) (formerly known as Nested Page Tables). Through RVI, the AMD processor provides two levels of address translation. This additional page table is used to translate guest physical addresses to system physical address allowing the guest to control its own page tables. This negates the need for the hypervisor to intercept the guest’s modifications of the page tables. This model provides virtualization overhead improvement as compared with traditional software shadow page tables.
In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V can use the AMD RVI technology to increase performance of the virtualization platform and results in system resource savings. These savings include a drop in Hypervisor CPU time as well as a reduction in memory overhead.
The continued cooperative development efforts between Microsoft and AMD are highly valued and critical in delivering great virtualization technology.
If you have more questions about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, or about other Microsoft server, desktop, or management virtualization products, check out Edwin Yuen’s web chat on March 31. It’s 8am-noon PST. Register and submit questions ahead of time here.
Thanks to AMD for allowing me to post a guest blog.
Bryon Surace a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team within the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Unleashing high performance applications with AMD and VMware
Posted by Julie Lass in 1:09 PM
We all count on Moore’s Law to make our lives easier every time we upgrade to the next generation of computing systems, but we sometimes forget that there’s a lot of hard work that goes into improving the performance of our hardware and software.
I’m John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog. For AMD’s Virtualization Ecosystem Month, I thought I’d talk about the recent performance testing we’ve seen with the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (codenamed “Shanghai”) and how VMware Virtual Infrastructure can unleash your applications to take full advantage of your new hardware.
First of all, these processors are fast. Here is some background on VMmark from our VROOM! Blog:
VMmark is a benchmark intended to measure the performance of virtualization environments in an effort to allow customers to compare platforms. It is also useful in studying the effect of architectural features. VMmark consists of six workloads (Web, File, Database, Java, Mail and Standby servers). Multiple sets of workloads (tiles) can be added to scale the benchmark load to match the underlying hardware resources. For more information on VMmark see here.
Now take a look at the VMmark Results page: a screen shot of the three current top scoring entries is shown on the right. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8384 is powering all of those top-scoring entries.
One of the reasons these Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are so fast is that they contain AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology, which gives hardware support for MMU virtualization. We wrote a white paper showing how VMware ESX takes advantage of RVI, including a 29% increase in performance with Citrix XenApp; and in a recent study on our VROOM! blog, we showed RVI boosting VMmark performance boost by as much as 17%.
These processors are fast, but can your application take advantage of them? Many applications can’t utilize all the cores of modern CPUs. We tested the ability of the Apache web server to scale up and use more CPU cores using th
e web performance benchmark SPECweb®2005. Even using 8 processors, .However, if you scale out with VMware Virtual Infrastructure using multiple virtual machines, all running a web server, you can scale to take advantage of all 8 cores.Apache on a native, non-virtualization system only delivered 1.85x the performance of a single processor
We decided to show this by creating a rocket car and setting a land speed record. We documented how we built our web serving rocket car on an HP ProLiant DL585 G5 with four Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 8382 processors. This setup achieved the highest SPEC®web2005 result ever on a 16-core system. Now, there are cheaper ways to move this many transactions on a virtual platform, but we weren’t building a cargo-hauling truck, we were building a race car to prove a point – scaling out with virtual machine building blocks is the best way to overcome multi-core scaling limitations of current applications.
Check out the eye-opening graphs in Scott Drummond’s blog post showing how your application running in a native environment probably will (or won’t) scale over the next few years and how a virtual building block architecture can help you take advantage of the newest generation of processors. VMware will continue to work together with AMD to help unleash the power of your high performance applications with virtualization.
John Troyer manages VMware’s blogging and social media programs.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
SPEC and SPECweb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
One for all, and all for one
Posted by Julie Lass in 10:53 AM
I applaud AMD for instituting Virtualization Ecosystem Month because it reminds us of the Three Musketeers philosophy: “one for all, all for one.” Only through our combined efforts can we meet customer needs.
It’s hard to believe that only a few short years ago, hardware assisted virtualization was not generally available on the x86 platform. The intervening years have brought an enormous amount of innovation that translates directly into economic value to customers. And we’re not done yet.
While some may be looking for the next big problem to apply virtualization, many IT organizations want to keep on doing what they’re doing, only better. What is holding them back? From a workload perspective it is usually support, performance and risk. Support and risk can be lumped together as problems that require more than technology to solve. Workload performance has technology written all over it.
It used to be a truism that you could only virtualize the smallest, least mission critical workloads. But we read every day about organizations that have success virtualizing ever larger workloads. However, there are still some workloads that don’t fit comfortably in virtual hardware. If we want to virtualize everything, we need to reduce virtualization overhead.
Overheads are an inevitable part of virtualization; each layer of abstraction introduces another step to the dance. The trick is to identify which of the extra steps takes the most time, or is performed the most frequently. And then to find ways to remediate these overheads. One step along this path is optimizing SMP (i.e., more than 1 CPU) workloads. Once you move to a second CPU, there are all sorts of interesting issues introduced. As we tested larger workloads, we noticed that virtual CPUs were sometimes scheduled when they shouldn’t be. This caused extra processing without any benefit.
After analyzing the problem, we made a change that resulted in substantial performance improvements. But we worried about the impact this change could have in other scenarios. Exiting the virtual machine to the hypervisor is an expensive operation, and could introduce latencies if it was performed at the wrong time.
This is where the ecosystem shows its power. AMD technologies like AMD-V™ and RVI help reduce hypervisor and virtual machine overheads, allowing organizations to run bigger and more mission critical workloads. I think it’s a great demonstration of how hardware and software vendors can work together to solve a problem.
Much as the Musketeers learned, there may be obstacles along the journey, but perseverance and collaboration is what brings success in the end. The entire ecosystem benefits. And the results last a lot longer than a month.
Chris Barclay is responsible for product management and technology partnerships at Virtual Iron Software. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
(4.67 out of 5)