* User sees benefits in Intel’s and AMD’s server virtualization plans
Intel’s and AMD’s recently previewed server virtualization plans drew the applause of at least one IT administrator.
Intel has said it would enable server virtualization in its Pentium, Xeon and Itanium processors, and AMD has said it would do so in its Opteron. Their virtualization technologies will make unnecessary much of the “heavy lifting” VMware has to do now to create virtual machines.
“Based on the limited information available, it sounds like software will need to be specifically written to accommodate the hardware modifications,” says Scott Herold, senior network engineer at RapidApp, an IT consulting firm in Chicago. “Where we will find the most benefit is definitely within the expansion of virtual infrastructures within the environment by limiting virtualization overhead and migrating applications that may currently be out of scope for a virtual environment.”
Herold says that now there are a number of kernel-mode processes that do not run well in virtual machine environments, and Vanderpool and Pacifica (Intel’s and AMD’s virtualization technologies, respectively) should help those run.
“Applications with high amounts of TCP connections, for example, are difficult to virtualize,” Herold says. “Processor cycles that would typically handle VMkernel requests must be reallocated to handle the kernel processing required by these connections. By using multiple-core or [virtualized] processors, you can potentially allow parallel processes to be handled using a different core of the processor, without adding virtualization overhead.”
Presently VMware has overhead in its software that would be handled in the hardware. Intel’s and AMD’s virtualization technologies would allow VMware to better utilize the hardware it is running on and see performance gains, Herold says.
“Imagine a virtualization application that can run on several multiple-core processors and can off-load kernel-mode calls to these alternative cores,” Herold says. “Within VMware, the VMkernel would no longer have contention at the lowest level of the processor. This could potentially make virtualization overhead as we know it disappear.”
Herold also agrees that Intel’s and AMD’s plans are a step closer to giving x86-based servers the same or better functionality than Unix machines.
“Based on current testing it has been proven that a virtual machine can provide comparable performance at a fraction of the cost over a Unix-based LPAR [logical partition],” Herold says. “By eliminating virtualization overhead and increasing the performance of guest operating systems, we may see the performance of a virtual machine meet or exceed that of a high-end Unix system.”
