Hyper-V: A New World Order!

I can't help thinking this will be the first real year of the x86 Virtualization war. With the hypervisor already commoditised and the eight hundred pound gorilla in Redmond crashing the party soon, 2008 will be an intriguing year. It's still all down to the management tools. Secret source hypervisors from Vmware and Microsoft or Xen from the OpenSource?. Place your bets! The big question “is Hyper-V ready for the Data Centre?”.
- InsomniacsAnonymous

Posted by 142258 [Virtualization] ( January 21, 2008 07:58 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]

Hardware Assisted Virtualization - The Promised Land?

Intel and AMD marketing departments have been busy these past 12-months or so using Virtualization to differentiate their processors, but when will the enterprise benefit from x86 Hardware Assisted Virtualization? In a nutshell, Hardware Assisted Virtualization means the processors removing some of the architectural inefficiencies the hypervisor had to provide in software. AMD-V (aka Pacifica) combined with direct attached memory and on-chip memory controller looks the most interesting technology with extensions, Tagged TLBs, DEV (Device Exclusion Vectors) in the current shipping of Rev-F Opteron processors. Yet it's the Nested Page Tables expected with AMD's Quad core which provides the most interesting development. Now ask when the hypervisor vendors will enable this new capability and life gets a little more complicated. Microsoft and Xen tout they are AMD-V aware and support Intel's VT, but all I hear from Vmware is next year??? See you at VMworld, I know the answers I'm looking for!
- InsomniacsAnonymous

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(N.B. As an employee of Sun Microsystems, the opinions expressed here are purely my own and not necessarily that of Sun or any other party).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by 142258 [Virtualization] ( November 02, 2006 10:59 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]

Virtualization - Battle of the Tools?

I remember about 12-months ago presenting to a large audience on Virtualization. Only memorable because I referenced “Virtual Machine Sprawl is coming” and it received an unintended laugh. But they were laughing at me rather than considering the relevance of the statement. It really doesn't matter your preference for managing large numbers of physical servers, OS instances, or application containers, you need to be in control. So interesting to see Virtual Machine sprawl all over the technical press and IT Managers debating the consequence of large scale DC virtualization. Performance differences exist in the hypervisor solutions but probably not significant enough to differentiate between the leading brands considering the x86 processor advances. So for me, it's down to the tools for managing the virtualized environments and to determine if you believe it's worth paying extra licensing fees? Vmware appears ahead but for how long? With the OS vendors providing alternatives it's a fascinating landscape.
- InsomniacsAnonymous

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(N.B. As an employee of Sun Microsystems, the opinions expressed here are purely my own and not necessarily that of Sun or any other party).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by 142258 [Virtualization] ( October 27, 2006 05:35 AM ) Permalink | Comments[0]