Posts tagged with Magny-Cours
Live Migration: The Best Keeps Getting Better with AMD Opteron™ Processors
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 8:00 AM
Loading ...It’s been a busy couple of months, as AMD has been working in tandem with Microsoft on their whole suite of “new efficiency” products – namely, Windows® 7 and Windows Server® 2008 R2. There has been a great deal of excitement over these launches for some time now; and rightfully so. Windows 7 is a big deal for the industry as a whole, and we’re specifically excited about the graphics capabilities as well as its great matchup with Vision Technology from AMD.* But, what I want to talk about is, not surprisingly, what the IT guys play with: servers. Windows Server 2008 R2 has major implications for virtualization in particular, and here’s why:
Some of the largest enhancements to Windows Server 2008 R2 focus around Hyper-V – Microsoft’s hypervisor. Hyper-V R2 works hand-in-hand with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology to help reduce the overall complexity and memory overhead of managing VMs, particularly through inherent features of AMD-V technology, like Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI). However, another one of the capabilities that you’ll find interesting is live migration. IT Managers are always vocal about the need to dynamically move virtual workloads around in order to optimize their system performance and aid with possible disaster recovery. AMD has worked with our virtualization partners since the early days of the AMD Opteron™ processor, to ensure we have the technology in place to support seamless live migration, and our consistent server platforms are critical for this.
Case in point: we recently worked with Microsoft to showcase live migration of virtual machine from our current Six-Core AMD Opteron processor to our next-generation AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor (currently codenamed “Magny-Cours”) with Hyper-V (you may recall, we did this previously, but from Quad-Core to Six-Core AMD Opteron processors here). Have a look for yourself:
As you can tell, Windows Server 2008 R2 is already enabled for the upcoming AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor. In fact Microsoft recently made available for download an update designed to boost the power-saving features of the latest Windows client and server releases when used with AMD multi-core processors. This refresh can tweak the Windows Server 2008 RS in order to leverage the Enhanced C1 state (C1E) for lower power consumption, which is a power efficiency feature of the AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series platform.
We’re pleased to congratulate Windows Server 2008 R2 on its introduction to the market, and can’t wait to push the boundaries on virtualization even more!
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. 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.
* Windows® 7 capable PC required for full Windows 7 functionality. See http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements.
AMD Opteron™ Processor + Our Partners = Masters of VMworld
Posted by tmueting in 6:08 PM
Well, once again we survived another whirlwind week at VMworld in San Francisco. I want to thank all of you that stopped by our booth to see our demonstrations or to attend one or more of our theater presentations. And, to those of you who attended my session on Thursday morning (after Wednesday night’s party no less!) – a special thank you. It was good to be able to meet many of you personally and I enjoyed hearing about your environment and your use of AMD OpteronTM processor-based platforms.
We ran a full slate of theater presentations in the AMD Booth and, from what I saw, every session was standing room only. This year we were treated to two customer presentations – Scott Ramnitz from First Data Corporation and Michael Foltz of Kroger Co. – two long time AMD customers and early adopters of virtualization shared their experiences.
In addition to Scott and Michael, on Tuesday Steve Pope, CTO of Solarflare Communications discussed the performance challenges that virtualization presents for I/O Devices. Solarflare is a leading silicon vendor delivering products that enable the rapid adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for data center and enterprise networks. Along with Solarflare and VMware, we demonstrated near native performance of AMD’s I/O virtualization technology on an AMD engineering development system featuring 4 twelve-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors (codenamed “Magny-Cours”) and four AMD SR5690 chipsets running VMware ESX 4.0 and Solarflare’s 10GeB NIC. Please note that the AMD OpteronTM 6100 series processors, code-named “Magny-Cours,” referenced below are scheduled to be launched in the first quarter of 2010.
On Wednesday, Ron Graham, Technical Marketing Manager from Sun lead a discussion on virtualization performance on AMD OpteronTM processor based Sun servers like the 8-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and then again on Thursday Ron returned to discuss Sun’s AMD OpteronTM processor-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems that deliver mission-critical entry storage. One of the most popular sessions of the week was given by Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization for Citrix Corporation. Simon didn’t mince words while giving us his unique perspective on the state of virtualization today and what he believes we can expect in the future in his talk entitled ”Cloud Computing and Desktop Virtualization.” AMD continues our close work with Citrix on XenServer and XenApp and supported the Introduction of Xen Cloud Platform to help accelerate customer adoption of open enterprise-class cloud infrastructures.
Also on Thursday Armando Acosta, Product Manager from Dell presented “Dell Solutions to Power the Efficient Enterprise.” Armando discussed Dell’s AMD OpteronTM processor-based blade and rack server solutions designed specifically for virtualization and the enterprise, including the Dell PowerEdge 905 server which took home a 2009 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award
For those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend one of these sessions or would like to revisit the slides you can see them here (along with a host of other information) at the AMD Booth on VMworld.com. Also check out the latest AMD Virtualization Update by AMD’s Director of Commercial Solutions, Margaret Lewis.
All-in-all it was another successful event for AMD. As virtualization is hitting mainstream AMD has released a full line of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors that provides superior value for your most important virtualization workloads. Don’t just take my word for it, according to a recent blog post at Solori that analyzes price/performance for 2-socket servers – “Istanbul continues to offer a 20-30% CAPEX value proposition against Nehalem in the virtualization use case…”
Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. 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.
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