Posts tagged with Parallels

First of all, I’d like to extend a big thanks to Microsoft, Oracle, Parallels, Virtual Iron, and VMware for supporting Virtualization Ecosystem Month in this blog. Our goal for VEM was to raise the level of awareness around our technology partners’ virtualization innovation and provide customers with insightful information as they evaluate and implement this important technology. With the tremendous support we’ve had from our technology partners I believe we’ve started some great conversations! But as we wrap up this exciting month, I’d like to take a minute to reflect.
It’s easy to see that virtualization it is a technology that has real benefits for companies both big and small. Not to mention, it is underlying technology for another key computing paradigm that is gearing up – cloud computing.
One thing we at AMD understand is that virtualization for x86 is a fast moving train. Six years ago when we introduced AMD Opteron™ x86 processor technology, virtualization was in its infancy. Today it is a technology that is racing to move beyond early adopters and moving quickly into the mainstream – a trend backed by much industry research.
Six years ago there were no hardware hooks in x86 processors to assist virtualization software. Today – through the power of cooperation – virtualization represents a very delicate dance between hardware and software. It requires joint development efforts between processor vendors and hypervisor providers.
AMD has software engineers working hand-in-hand with major virtualization software partners and is an active contributor to Xen and KVM open source virtualization projects. The end result – we are moving toward near native application performance in virtualized environments, running servers with high utilization rates, and helping to reduce the energy footprint of data centers.
So what’s next? We need to drive toward the next level of cooperation, which is heterogeneous virtualization. Customers are asking us to drive innovation in the direction of interoperability. We need live migration between different processors brands – not just between generations of the same processor. We need enablement – not lock-out and I think Virtualization Ecosystem Month was a great way to get conversations going about how to address this customer need. While March is over, I encourage all of our partners and customers to keep the virtualization ecosystem spirit alive and work together to continue to further this important and game-changing technology.