intel

Lenovo Becomes First PC Maker to Announce Proprietary Client Virtualization Platform (CVP)

April 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Last week, Lenovo announced the first low-level client virtualization software platform offered by any PC hardware manufacturer.

Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) will be the base technology for customer solutions shipping with Lenovo PC products later this year. Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform uses the latest hardware features to isolate applications. These applications provide improved internet security and manageability, while minimizing the impact on performance. At Intel’s Developer Forum in Shanghai, Lenovo made the first public demonstration of solutions based on this technology. Lenovo’s platform uses Intel Virtualization technology to help to bring similar benefits to PC clients with near native performance and full Windows PC experience.

“Our new client virtualization technology underscores Lenovo’s commitment to innovation,” said George He, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Lenovo. “Our leadership in PC virtualization will enable us to optimize PC systems for virtualized applications and give our customers access to more efficient, more stable, and better performing virtualization solutions in the near future.”

“Intel and Lenovo have worked closely on optimizing virtualization for several years,” said Gregory Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Office Platform Division. “By taking advantage of Intel’s Virtualization Technologies, Lenovo’s Client Virtualization Platform is able to bring new levels of security and manageability to customers.”

[Source: Tarry Singh]

VirtualLogix Adds Support For Intel VT-d, Now Fit For Windows Environments

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix has updated the Intel Architecture (IA) version of its embedded virtualization stack, which targets performance-critical telecom and datacom applications. VLX for Network Infrastructure (VLX-NI) 3.0 adds support for Intel VT-d (virtualization technology for directed I/O), Microsoft Windows guests, and Core Microarchitecture 3.0, while adding new Eclipse-based set-up tools.

VirtualLogix made the announcement at the Multicore Expo today in Santa Clara, where it also announced having joined the Multicore Association. From the press release:

VirtualLogix’s new release blends the rich Microsoft Windows operating system environment with the existing capabilities of real-time operating systems (RTOS) or Linux by applying real-time virtualization technology on platforms using multicore processors.

Communications applications often require separate hardware to handle Windows interfaces and mission-critical portions of the equipment. VirtualLogix’s real-time virtualization software simplifies the design by allowing all software to share a common hardware platform. With VLX for Network Infrastructure v3.0, networking and telecommunication equipment makers can quickly develop next-generation products, reduce development and bill-of-material costs and lower power consumption. In the industrial and automation markets, where Windows is also widely used to provide user friendly interfaces to machinery, VLX is able to support the time-sensitive control and signal processing functions these areas demand.

[Source: LinuxDevices – who also interviewed VirtualLogix’s VP of Marketing, Mark Milligan]

3Leaf Systems Obtains Intel License For CPU Virtualization

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters 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.

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]

Virtualization all the way to Kyoto?

March 30, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Blade servers

Although blade servers are not directly related to virtualization, they are often considered since the Blade-concept also involves around several kinds of consolidation (physical, logical, partitioning, etc…). Any one who ever stood behind an open rack filled with running blades can certainly testify about the generated heating. If you happen to pay the electricity bill, you certainly now about the extravagant energy cost! Also bear in mind that all this heat needs to be cooled down again requiring even more energy for your datacenter. I wonder how long it will take before chipmakers will manage to include energy consumption in their equation of “moore’s law”. Now the technology sector is only starting to become a little more environmentally concerned, thus making the Kyoto goals more reachable. Intel recently announced Conroe, a desktop processor that is 40% faster than the current generation while using 40% less power and unveiled a server processor, Woodcrest, which boasts 80% more power and 35% less power consumption.

Energy consumption

Joan Goodchild at SearchWinIT.com & SearchDataCenter.com reports on the high energy consumption of blades.

“Blade servers, which are deemed the next big thing in hardware, are also a big energy drain in an enterprise, according to a recent study that looks at the latest advances in server technology. The results of the study by TheInfoPro (TIP) Inc., a New York research firm, reveal that these new server technologies have not provided heating and cooling advantages. TIP recently released the second half of a server study it conducted in 2005. The research examined the concerns of 133 server professionals.
…
Despite their intense heat production, the slim servers are indeed a priority for IT managers. According to TIP’s survey, 62% of the respondents said they will spend more money on blade servers in the next year.
Bob Gill (TIP’s chief research officer) said blade vendors are realizing that excess power is a problem in terms of energy efficiency, and there is an initiative among them to create blades that are more energy-efficient. A number of groups have suggested that vendors should develop a standard for measuring energy efficiency and then develop technology accordingly. He also noted that virtualization technology would alleviate some problems with power efficiency and consolidation.Overall, the research found that power and energy pose the biggest challenges for server administrators. Thirty-eight percent of users said power requirements are the greatest challenge to the data center. Thirty-one percent cited cooling requirements, and just over 20% cited heat output.”It’s a vicious cycle,” said Gill. “While systems become denser, their energy efficiency has decreased. Devices are getting smaller and smaller, but they are getting hotter.”

Read the whole SearchDataCenter.com article at source.

Next Microsoft Virtual Server slips to 2007

March 29, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft has delayed an update for Microsoft Virtual Server until early 2007.

Reported by Stephen Shankland at Cnet News.Com in an interview with James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.

” The Service Pack 1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel’s Virtualization and Advanced Micro Devices’ Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.

The postponement comes on the heels of Microsoft’s delays of Windows Vista and Office 2007. “Quality always takes priority over timeline,” the Microsoft representative said.

Microsoft’s top competitors have suffered similar setbacks. Market leader VMware had planned to release its next top-end ESX Server product, version 3.0, by the end of March but gave itself three more months. The other major competitor, the open-source Xen project, had planned to release its version 3.0 by August 2005 but in fact didn’t release it until December. ”

….

“The beta version of SP1 still is scheduled to arrive in the second quarter, said James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.

The new version also will include Volume Shadow Services, which lets all a computer’s virtual machines be backed up simultaneously, Ni said. The feature also permits the graceful restart of all those virtual machines, letting customers rely on the software without having to worry as much about the consequences of server failure.

“Basically, it allows us to do a snapshot of all the virtual machines running on a host. Then you can use something like Virtual Server with Data Protection Manager to create good backup and recovery,” Ni said. “You can recover the entire host and all the virtual machines running in a very orchestrated fashion.”

Microsoft faces major competition in the market from EMC subsidiary VMware and increasingly the Xen project that’s being built into forthcoming versions of Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Microsoft is working hard for a piece of the action, however. In December, it cut prices of Virtual Server 2005 R2 from $999 to $199 for the Enterprise Edition and $499 to $99 for the Standard Edition. The Standard Edition runs on servers with up to four processors, while Enterprise is for larger machines.

At the same time, though, market leader VMware is making its own moves. It released its Player software for free, which lets people download and try out virtual machines preconfigured with software, and made its GSX Server product into the free VMware Server. That product competes directly with Microsoft Virtual Server; VMware still charges for its higher-end ESX Server.

Much of Microsoft’s attention is directed toward the future with a successor, the Microsoft hypervisor, code-named Viridian. Virtual Server requires Windows as a foundation, but hypervisors are lower-level software. ESX Server and Xen both employ the hypervisor approach.

One major change coming with Viridian will be support for 64-bit virtual machines, Ni said. That will catch Microsoft up with Xen and VMware, which support 64-bit virtual machines today.

Viridian isn’t likely to debut until 2008 at the earliest, however. It’s designed to work with the upcoming Longhorn Server, a server-oriented version of Windows Vista that’s scheduled to arrive in 2007, but it’s more likely to arrive with a service pack sometime 18 to 24 months afterward, Ni said.

“We’re not committing to whether the hypervisor is part of the initial release or not. Right now, from a scheduling perspective, it doesn’t look like it,” Ni said.

Read the full article at source.

Red Hat Isn’t Exhibiting ‘Xen’-Ophobia

March 20, 2006 by Robin Wauters 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.