Posts tagged with Virtual Iron
Yin and Yang of Virtualization Maturity
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 11:38 AM
Loading ...Yin and Yang of Virtualization Maturity
The notion of consolidation is almost synonymous with virtualization. In the x86 world, we have cut our teeth on virtualization that consolidates workloads of underutilized servers. When x86 virtualization was first taking root, led by pioneers such as VMware and Parallels in 1998/1999 and even Connectix in some respect the late 1980s, we started to see a common phenomena of new markets – lots of innovation and the emergence of startup companies and new technology projects in larger companies. I like to think of this as the Ying phase.
We are now in a more mature phase of virtualization – the Yang phase – with the opposite phenomena of the consolidation of virtualization companies, projects, and technology. Early on Microsoft bought Connectix with Hyper-V being the fruit of this union. Parallels bought Virtuozzo and extended itself to the world of Windows and Linux. And more recently we witnessed Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems and now Virtual Iron.
Oracle has already consolidated some powerful business processing applications under its name and will now add some very critical virtualization technology. Oracle understands the importance of virtualization as an underlying infrastructure technology for the x86 computing world. Its grid technology, introduced in 2003, leveraged innovations like 64-bit and multi-core that AMD was driving into x86 processor architecture and served as a forerunner in scale-out cluster environments that now are taking on the name of cloud computing.
With its purchase of Virtual Iron, Oracle adds another product that is based on the Xen open-source hypervisor technology. While a smaller player in the virtualization market, Virtual Iron has always had a good reputation for software that delivers dynamic resource management and automation. This includes providing some necessary features for making virtualization a mainstream technology, such as capacity management, power management, and the ability to integrate with other software through an open, comprehensive, and scriptable API. Coupled with Oracle’s and Sun’s current Xen-based virtualization projects, this provides a very nice framework for some serious virtualization technology. Another interesting aspect of Virtual Iron, it brings a software that has been more geared to the mid-market in the more enterprise portfolio of Oracle and Sun, a point made by well respected industry analyst, Gordon Haff, in a recent article about the acquisition.
So , we are now living through the consolidation of the vendors who are developing consolidation software. This brings some very interesting symmetry to the market.
As always we want to promote open discussion about virtualization trends in the community, so please let me know your thoughts – pro and con – on the consolidation of virtualization vendors.
Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions
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.
@margaretjlewis
User Enablement Instead of Vendor Lock-Out
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 11:43 AM
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.
Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions
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.
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.
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