Posts tagged with Shanghai

As you can imagine, migrating virtual machines without downtime is considered a core technology for building flexible and highly availability virtualized environments. So there were many questions around whether a hypervisor could gain widespread acceptance if it did not offer live migration capabilities. Fast forward to Spring 2009, and it is clear that Hyper-V has made a significant impact on the market.

In fact, a March article by Stephen Sowyer of Virtualization Review, highlights research by industry analyst firm, Gartner, who reported within the next five years “Microsoft and VMware will vie for bragging rights in the server virtualization infrastructure segment.” This builds on the October 2008 Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker from industry analyst firm, IDC, which concluded, “In its first quarter of general availability Microsoft Hyper-V delivered a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft’s market share is 23% of new shipments.” These findings are truly significant given Microsoft entered the world of virtualization less than a year ago.

With today’s release of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft will offer live migration capabilities, enabling users to virtualize their IT environment in the most cost effective manner while having full access to enterprise-class features.

Now, a lot of folks new to virtualization don’t quite understand all the factors involved in making live migration a reality (in fact, I’m sure some of you are wondering why we keep blogging on the topic). To perform live migration with Hyper-V 2008 R2, you are required to have the failover clustering role added and configured on the servers running Hyper-V. Failover clustering requires shared storage for the servers in the cluster nodes so that all virtual machines can be stored in the shared storage area and running virtual machine state can be managed by one of the nodes (check out this great step-by-step guide on TechNet here).

Another thing you have to consider with live migration is the multiple generations of processors you have running on the servers you want to move. To do live migration successfully, you need processors with the same feature sets by the same processor manufacturer.  Hyper-V Manager allows you to move a running VM to a physical server with different processor features without restarting the VM—but you will likely lose some processor functionality.

 

An advantage for folks with a data center full of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors—even various generations—is our stable platform approach enables folks to do live migration between the processor family (“Barcelona” to “Shangahi” to our upcoming six-core “Istanbul” processors) without losing any functionality—see for yourself as we migrate across all three generations with Hyper-V 2008 here.

 

This stable platform approach is something we also use for power efficiency. You may have seen that we recently announced our new low power (EE) processors which provide the same level of functionality as other versions but with a lower power envelope.

As you can imagine, I’m very excited about the live migration demonstration with Microsoft and its upcoming Hyper-V 2008 R2 technology. Working with the virtualization team over there has been a rewarding experience and I’m impressed with the inroads they have made on the virtualization market since the release of Hyper-V. I look forward to continuing to working with the team to push us all towards the “holy grail” of virtualization as it is a technology that truly enables a powerful and dynamic virtualization experience for customers.

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.

 

 

 

Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions

@margaretjlewis