Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

amd

Red Hat Embraces AMD Virtualization Capabilities In HP Servers

by Leave a Comment

Red Hat today announced its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers.

Red Hat

The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP is now offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat said. Also, support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs has now been added.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

“Red Hat also is offering para-virtualized device drivers to make I/O workloads in virtual guests perform close to the bare-metal performance of the system”, said Doug Shakshober, senior consulting engineer at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 has been shipping since November 2007.

[Source: Test Center Daily]

Dell Now Offers Five Server Platforms Based On Quad-Core AMD Opteron

by Leave a Comment

AMD today announced that Dell is now offering five server platforms based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. This news follows last week’s announcement that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are generally available, and brings the number of available global OEM platforms based on the new processors to 13. Additionally, AMD is announcing today that VMware has completed qualification of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors for use in VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor deployments, enabling customers to leverage the latest in VMware virtualization on these server systems.

Dell

Dell servers now supporting Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, as well as the new PowerEdge T605 tower server. The T605, aimed at SMEs or remote locations, offers features such as hot-plug hard drives, remote management and redundant power supplies, resulting in high-availability systems that help prevent data access loss and increase uptime.

“Dell is delivering on its vision to simplify IT by providing customers with a seamless and simple upgrade path to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors on PowerEdge servers,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Business Product Group. “The combination of AMD’s most advanced processors running on Dell PowerEdge servers provides an optimal balance of performance and energy efficiency across a variety of customer solutions, from general purpose and remote office to high-performance compute clusters and virtualized data center environments.”

[Source: Hardocp]

3Leaf Systems Obtains Intel License For CPU Virtualization

by Leave a Comment

3Leaf Systems today announced it has obtained a license for Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect, which will allow it to build virtualization support for Intel servers. Previously, the company only had a HyperTransport license and only supported AMD servers.

virtualization-3leaf-3leafsystems.jpg

3Leaf uses a direct communication network between server CPUs so data does not have to go over an Ethernet or Fibre Channel connection. The company fabricates special virtualization processors for the motherboard to virtualize the CPUs, memory and I/O of the entire datacenter.

The 3Leaf technology breaks down the physical walls of x86 servers and makes their resources available, as needed, across the datacenter. One of the problems in data centers is one group of servers dedicated to a task might be running at 5 % utilization, while another group is maxed out and needs more CPU cycles and more memory.

“We are enabling the next generation of the datacenter, which are going to be dynamic data centers, where resources, compute, memory or I/O could be made available to the applications on an on demand basis rather than in a static way the way it exists today,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO of 3Leaf.

“At the end of the day we’re almost reinventing the mainframe here,” said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization marketplaces. “I spoke to someone at American Express who said ‘VMware is great but I can’t scale outside the box.’ I think we’re going to see that, where flexibility will require the ability to virtualize outside of the sheet metal.”

The solution is an unusual one: a chip to handle the load balancing that goes into the processor socket. So instead of an Opteron or Xeon on the motherboard socket, a 3Leaf processor goes in its place. A PCI Express card isn’t an option, as the bus is not fast enough.

The AMD-based 3Leaf processor is planned for the first half of 2009 while the Intel one is planned for the first half of 2010.

[Source: InternetNews]

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

by Leave a Comment

Jay Lyman from The 451 Group (also check out the interview we did with John Abbott, Chief Analyst & Research Director at The 451 Group) wonders about the future of Linux distributions in the virtualization arena.

Now that VMWare announced that it will embed its ESX 3i hypervisor in different server platforms from HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM, the question pops up how Operating System Vendors will deal with this change of platform.

VMWare certainly isn’t the only one with those plans, since Ian Pratt from XenSource mentionned exactly the same during his Fosdem talk.

How do the OS vendors react to this new feature ? According to Lyman’s blog post, Red Hat claims

it is hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel that will create that standard virtualization layer and capability.

and

Novell indicates VMware may be taking somewhat of a risk, though, since OEMs like HP will look to upsell to their own software to create and manage VMs, which ESX 3i can’t do.

A hypervisor still needs management tools, so that the guest OS’s can be initiated, stopped and migrated. Applications aren’t running on hypervisors (yet); they need an operating system for IO, Memory Management and Network stacks at least for the foreseeable future.

On a longer term, we’ll have applications running natively on the hypervisor for sure. But today Operating System vendors are hoping for a uniform and better way to support different available and upcoming hypervisors and off course those lightweight systems will also benefit from these improvements.

If I were in the Operating System market I wouldn’t worry yet at this pointis , just as with all other features that hardware vendors are selling it is still ‘only’ a feature. When ordering a Dell you can choose between different CPU’s, different hard disks, different Operating Systems and most likely in the near future, different hypervisors as well.

Red Hat Isn’t Exhibiting ‘Xen’-Ophobia

by Leave a Comment

Quoting Jason Brooks from eWeek:

Red Hat’s announcement March 14 of its integrated virtualization push, starring Xen, didn’t take anyone by surprise: Red Hat, along with just about everybody else, has been tooting the Xen horn ever since the fledgling open-source virtualization technology began grabbing headlines almost a year ago.
…
The trouble is that Xen is somewhat early on in its development, and the high rate of change in Xen’s code base will keep the technology out of the mainstream Linux kernel for some time.

Red Hat has and will continue to chart its own course with respect to the kernel, diverging from the mainstream where and when appropriate, but Xen’s potential will remain somewhat stunted for as long as it remains in heavy flux…

I’d like to see Red Hat add to its virtualization agenda the OpenVZ project—a GPL’d code base born of SWsoft’s 5-year-old commercial Virtuozzo product, which itself is roughly comparable to the containers in Sun Microsystems’ Solaris 10…

 OpenVZ, which also is vying for inclusion in the mainstream Linux kernel, would complement Xen well and has impressed me in the initial testing I’ve conducted.

Ultimately, it might make the most sense for Red Hat to deploy both Xen and OpenVZ. The complementary technologies would be a good counterbalance to the Xen/container combo I expect to see eventually in Solaris…

Read the whole article at eWeek.

Red Hat announces Integrated Virtualization

by Leave a Comment

Quoting from the Red Hat official announcement:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today formally announced its ‘Integrated Virtualization’ strategy. During a launch today in San Francisco, company executives detailed plans for creating a Red Hat virtualization environment and working with partners such as AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource to simplify virtualization deployment for customers.
…
Red Hat will tightly integrate virtualization capabilities with its operating system and ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, from management tools and installation to software management, will enable customers to deploy virtualized environments easily and effectively.
…
This month Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available, which will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology. In the summer of 2006, Red Hat will make Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 5, scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualization…

There also is a 1-hour-long recorded webcast of this press event available here.