Thoughts on Infrastructure : Virtualization

The New Moore’s Law

BjarneD — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:46:47 GMT

Times They are a-Changing

A new report from IDC lays out what should be obvious to anyone who has followed two of the biggest recent trends in the server market—multicore and virtualization—by suggesting that when you have two popular new technologies that are designed to let customers consolidate multiple servers into a single box, then server vendors can expect to sell fewer such boxes. In other words, when customers begin rapidly replacing multiple servers with single servers, server sales start to dip (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/03/multicore-virtualization-and-a-shrinking-server-market-maybe-or-maybe-not.ars)

As some of you may know software has been riding what we refer to as Moore’s Law for a couple of decades. What you may not know is that this “observation” dates back to 1965.

Here’s what I found at Wikipedia:“Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half a century and in 2005 was not expected to stop for another decade at least.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_Law)

It seems that we should all fear progress doesn’t it? Just when Intel/AMD has started to take advantage of silicon in new and imaginary ways, somebody needs to paint a very bleak picture of our future. As if we need more bad news, right?

While I don’t disagree with the fact as IDC sees them I’m not sure about their conclusion and I believe they report is over-simplify the issue. In fact over a century ago, Mark Twain put it very succinctly “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”

No one is suggesting the way Moore’s will continue to manifest itself is by continuing to crank up the clock speed, we may actually see the clock speed go down a bit. In fact, both Intel and AMD are going to increase the power of the microchip by adding more cores. How many? How fast? That depends on how much you trust the two chip manufacturers ability to continue shrinking the size of the transistors on their CPU’s.

The public roadmaps from both Intel and AMD clearly shows that they are going to continue to add more cores, in fact everything points to that at least Intel will continue to double the numbers of transistors on their CPU as well as other innovative steps (I’ll get to that later). This would mean that we are going to see the number of cores on Intel CPU’s double every two years (as per Moore’s Law). If we start applying that to PC’s coming in the first part of the next decade, that means we’ll see cell phone with dualcore CPU designs, Laptops with 4-8 cores, desktops (or Workstations) with 12-16 cores and servers with over 512 cores.

In the next couple of years we will likely see Intel and AMD continue to take advantage of their ability to continue to shrink the transistors, but rather that use this to add more CPU like cores to the design, you will see them add more specialized cores to their CPU designs: Dedicated cores for IO, networking, and graphics (check out Intel’s Larrabee).

This will likely provide computer manufacturers with some very scalable designs. Think LEGO (TM) brinks.

We are also going to see Intel and AMD pull a fast one and reverse it. Huh? Well, think about the Atom CPU presently powering the ultra-compact laptops commonly knows as Netbooks. What Intel did what to take a single-core CPU and rather than adding more CPU’s to the die, they shrunk it. Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that Intel will continue that trend. This obviously means that we’ll get more powerful Atom (dualcore and beyond with more powerful graphics capabilities), but also smaller CPU’s as well as PC-on-an-chip designs designed for smaller devices such as smartphones and devices between the Netbooks and Smartpones, commonly known as MID’s (Moblie Internet Devices).

But all of this great stuff is all for naught, at least according to Gartner and IDC, right? No so fast!

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will both dramatically increase their multi-tasking (actually their multi-threading) capabilities when they become available. The redesigned kernel architectures that went into Windows (with 7 and Server 2008 R2) is believe to scale linearly by introducing a new scheduling design as well as a better way to control processor affinity (for more about this, check out this video interview with Mark Russinovich on http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/) . To date the Server team has publicly demonstrated Windows Server 2008 R2 up to 256 cores (or logical processors) in a single machine the only thing holding the test team back is the relative scarcity of these monster servers.

And as most of us tend to run multiple applications, browsers, email clients and background processing such as anti-virus, you will continue to take advantage of the multicore CPU’s by way of Windows multi-threading capabilities. In fact, the real challenge moving forward may not be Windows (or any other OS), but the tools available to write applications. For more information about this check out what our Developer Tools Division is doing with the parallel extension and their recently announced next generation tools and compilers.

All of this is to simply suggest that we will continue to tweak our products capabilities, including Windows, to ensure our customers can take advantage of the power of Moore’s Law. Now, the Virtualization and Virtual Machine (VM) density on servers? That’s a different story!

Windows Server 2008 is called SP1 - a shameless plug

BjarneD — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:04:17 GMT

As I'm sure you're perfectly well aware, Windows Server 2008 just shipped. Let's try that again: Windows Server 2008 just shipped! The server companion of the much criticized Window Vista.

It's been a 4 year journey for a lot of people in our organization. But it's finally out and you can now enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Windows Server 2008 is both and end-point as well as the first station in a longer journey. Let me elaborate a bit on that:

Windows Server 2008 is the last 32-bit server operating system from Microsoft.

We said it before, and we will say it again, the next version of Windows Server is going to a 64-bit release only. In fact Bob Muglia first announced this during IT Forum in Barcelona a couple of years ago. We want to make sure that our customers can take advantage of the good stuff that AMD and Intel put in their CPU's. And transitioning to 64-bit will allow you to run more on a Windows Server, it will allow us to continue to make Windows Server a more secure OS.

Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards modularizing Windows Server for particular workloads.

We worked really hard to start the process of both provide a better layering of the OS as well as ensure that you can deploy Windows Server 2008 for a particular workload (such as Virtualization) and not have to content with the extra baggage of the stuff you don't want, this is referred to as Server Core. The Server Manager will go a long way towards make it very simple to do this.

Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards making Windows Server the best virtualization platform.

Even though Hyper-V didn't make it onto the CD for the release, a lot of effort has gone into making sure that when it is released, it will fit perfectly. Indeed, there's even a Server Core role for Hyper-V. The initial feedback from both beta testers and reviewers looks very good, and we will continue to make Hyper-V the best it can be.

If you're interested in the the journey of Windows Server and why Windows Server 2008's called Windows Server 2008 SP1, here a link to a blog from Iain McDonald explaining it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx

64-bit and Virtualization - Mainstream?

BjarneD — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:45:53 GMT

Virtualization will drive the adoption of 64-bit computing.

Back when we first started with the program we refer to as the Common Engineering Criteria (CEC), we pushed support for Virtualization and 64-bit processors across our products. Now it looks as if we're going to get help making them mainstream from customer demand, no less.

In case you don't know what Virtualization is or what 64-bit means, let me provide a short primer.

Effectively, Virtualization (Virtual Server and Longhorn Server's Windows Virtualization) creates a sandbox, where the application(s) running believe that there's nothing else running beside them and an OS. Access to hardware is provided through the Virtualization layer and it can support many different OS's. In many ways you can argue that we are simply taking the vitalization of resources in Windows one stop further.

64-bit is simply the next generation of processors. Both Intel and AMD have been pushing 64-bit for a while, albeit using different designs initially. There are many benefits of 64-bit computing, and it is not the purpose of this blog to go into them all, but let me summarize:

Hardware support for Virtualization
Support for a vast memory space
Better hardware protection from rogue programs

As I alluded to previously, we pushed the adoption of these two technologies since the initial set of the CEC, published in 2004. If you don't know what the CEC is you should read one of my previous blogs (Common Engineering Criteria - Consistency and Predictability).

It was obvious to us that adoption of 64-bit in general and Virtualization in particular was not a matter of if, but when. We were surprise how fast hardware caught up with regards to servers. Today it is virtually impossible to purchase new server hardware that is not x64-based.

In our CEC for 2008 we are dialing up the support for 64-bit (x64 specifically) system in the server space. We seen over the last year of so that customers have started starts to move from experimenting with vitalization to actually deploying in their data centers, although not in vast numbers initially.

We are assuming that Virtualization and 64-bit (in particular x64) will be mainstream by 2009. And I'm suggesting that the former will push the latter.

Huh?

Let me expand on that. With Windows Virtualization for Longhorn server (codename Viridian) we are introducing a new generation of Virtualization for Windows Server, among other things we taking advantage of the hardware support for Virtualization that AMD and Intel are providing with the their new generation of x64-bit processors (codename VT and Pacifica, respectively). This basically means that the Virtualization software no longer will have to do the heavy lifting of pretending that the OS inside it is running directly on hardware. Remember that Intel's x86 processors provide several levels of protection : Ring 0 through 3. x86 based OS, such as Windows run typically run in ring 0, with applications and most services running in Ring 1 -3. Both processors will provide new Virtualization extensions to allow an the Virtualization to run at a higher level than 0 (with better protection and higher priority that both ring 2 and ring 0), whilst providing the capability of allowing OS's to run in guest partitions on top of it in as though they were running in Ring 0. If this makes your brain hurt, think of it as if the hypervizor runs in ring -1.

In Windows Server "Longhorn" this means that we can provide a very thin OS (referred to as the Hypervizor), on top of which the actually OS's run. This very thin OS will provide a Master OS that controls the other OS's. Effectively, this will give us better performance as well as better control.

Without going to deep into what Virtualization is going bring us and what inevitable challenges we come across, I believe that our customers would want to use the new Virtualization capabilities we are provide together with Windows Server Longhorn.

However, there's a catch, the new hardware capabilities that I've just described above are only provided on Intel's and AMD's 64 bit processor. This means that in order for our customers to take advantage of these new capabilities, they'll have to move the 64-bit. It's my personal opinion that there's sufficient value in doing so, including the new Virtualization capabilities. Also, bear in mind that even though the hypervizor will run on 64-bit systems, it will support both 64- and 32-bit guests OS's.

Now, even in the longer term, it's unlikely that all applications will run in a virtualized environment, but a significant percentage will. Most likely, there will continue to be a number of applications that have special roles (anti-virus, etc) or requires access to specialized hardware devices, thus preventing these from taking advantage of the Virtualization technologies.

In conclusion, today we mandate that, unless there are specific hardware reasons, all infrastructure server products be capable of running in a virtualized environment (for more details, check the CEC homepage). We also mandate that all infrastructure server products support 64-bit. It's our goal that we will have completed the transition to 64-bit support (x64) of of our infrastructure server software by the end of 2009.

Clearly, there's a bright future for 64-bit systems and Virtualization, now we just need to manage those, but that is a topic for later.

If you wish to give me feedback as to what additional criteria (common features or technologies) we should consider in the years ahead feel free to post comments to this blog.

For more information go to the following site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/cer/overview.mspx