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.