x86 virtualization

Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor Sets New Benchmark for Virtualization Performance on the VMware Platform

August 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AMD today announced it has achieved the top spot on the VMware VMmark virtualization benchmark for x86 servers with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL585 G5. AMD now holds the top three spots on the 16-core VMmark benchmark.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications while enabling fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.) The VMmark 1.1 consolidation benchmark, released by VMware in May 2008, includes several workloads that take advantage of the benefits of RVI.

VMware VMmark 1.1 benchmark measures application performance in virtualized environments on a wide variety of enterprise workloads running simultaneously in separate virtual machines. Complete results for AMD’s latest VMmark score can be found here (PDF).

Bonus link: Forbes interviews Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at AMD.

Advanced Micro Devices

ScaleMP vSMP Foundation Standalone Now Supports Supermicro SuperBlade Server Platform

June 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ScaleMP today announced the expansion of its vSMP Foundation Standalone software product line to support the Supermicro SuperBlade server platform. Using its virtualization technology, ScaleMP enables the aggregation of up to ten Intel dual-processor blades to build a shared memory symmetric multiprocessor (SMP). The company says customers will benefit from 80 Intel Xeon processing cores and up to 640 GB of memory, providing one of the densest high-end x86 system on the market today.

According to the press release, ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation Standalone aggregation platform provides end customers with:

Large memory resource with up to 1TB of memory
Shared memory system coupled with up to 128 cores
Ease of use and lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications by aggregating multiple cluster nodes to a single system.

“Supermicro is pleased to see the ScaleMP leading-edge virtualization take advantage of the Supermicro SuperBlade,” said Alex Hsu, chief sales and marketing officer of Supermicro. “Our 10-blade SuperBlade system can scale from 2 to 20 processors (up to 80 cores), and up to 640 GB of RAM in a modular fashion, providing one of the densest high-end x86 systems on the market today in a space- and energy-efficient package, and making this solution very appealing to our customers.”

“ScaleMP teamed with Supermicro to deliver a high-end system that breaks new barriers in high-end computing,” said Shai Fultheim, Founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “This solution is very versatile and can address complex IT requirements from running commercial off-the-shelf HPC applications to homegrown applications that are compute- or memory-intensive, while providing reduced system management and operational complexity through a single image of the operating system.”

The SuperBlade from Supermicro touts enhanced system density in a 7U chassis, comes with an integrated InfiniBand switch, and can be housed in a 19” industry-standard rack, reducing the server footprint in the data center.

VMware’s x86 Virtualization Benchmark Tool VMmark Upgraded To Version 1.1

June 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMmark, VMware‘s free tool that hardware vendors, virtualization software vendors and other organizations can use to measure the performance and scalability of applications running in virtualized environments, has just reached version 1.1.

You can download it here and/or check the release notes over here.

[Source: VMware Blogs]

Gartner: Virtualization Wave To Cause Huge Market Disruption And Consolidation Through 2012

April 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Gartner says virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

From the press release (emphasis ours):

“Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.”

According to Gartner, the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. Server virtualization is already having an impact on the server market; Gartner believes that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 % in 2006. As hypervisor prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualization will have a significantly larger impact, and Gartner analysts predict that more than 4 million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.

The use of PC virtualization is also set to increase rapidly. The number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. On the PC, the decoupling technology that breaks the close ties and dependencies between hardware and software occurs at two levels: between hardware and the operating system (machine virtualization) and between the operating system and applications (application virtualization).

Check out Gartner’s special report on virtualization, including a number of useful guides and a podcast with industry analyst Thomas Bittman.