An Illuminata Spotlight piece considers the trend of virtualization moving into business applications, and how that is both reflected and enabled by the latest generation of Sun servers based on the new six-core AMD Opteron processors.

The examination first reviews how virtualization has evolved to make virtualizing business applications a highly desirable solution. The authors categorize the current state of x86 virtualization as one in its virtual infrastructure phase with the capability of spanning multiple systems in a data center and using base virtualization software, known as the hypervisor, as an enabler for other services. Key to its appeal is server consolidation, but the analysis points to virtualization abstraction as even more beneficial: "Taken in isolation, consolidation is just another form of partitioning, albeit a democratized version applied to volume hardware. But virtualization’s higher-level abstraction enables services such as easy workload balancing, failover, and migration - transformative new capabilities that can fundamentally improve IT operational efficiency."

The 5-page PDF looks at virtualization software, particularly VMware's latest solutions and their resulting benchmarks, and the growth in microprocessor cores per CPU from two to six and more. It is here that the AMD Opteron processors technology is detailed with information on:

• AMD-V, AMD’s umbrella term for its set of virtualization accelerators that enable high-performance hypervisors

• Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), part of AMD's processors, it creates a structure in hardware that handles translating memory addresses for a virtual machine into an actual location in physical memory, and

• AMD-Vi, lets devices be directly assigned to a guest OS, improving I/O performance and virtual machine isolation.

Systems designed for virtualization are approached next. Sun Fire servers equipped with the six-core AMD Opterons take full advantage of these revved up processors, the paper notes, with large memory banks, built-in network and I/O ports as well as I/O expandability. Sun systems discussed include the Sun Fire X4140, X4440, X4640, Sun Blade X6240, X6440 and 6048.

"(Server virtualizaton is) moving up to virtual infrastructure and even to a sort of datacenter meta-operating system as it morphs from point product for an individual server to one that spans many," the paper observes. "And it’s gaining the maturity, performance, and other attributes needed to run resource-intensive business applications and to be trusted to do so reliably."

More Information

AMD and Sun: Optimizing Virtualization for Business Apps - Registration or login required

Illuminata Inc.

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