Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Dell

Guest post: Moving Virtualization into the Mainstream

porourke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:41:00 GMT

I’d like to start this post by saying thank you to our friends at Microsoft for running my blog post here. As AMD is mid-way through Virtualization Ecosystem Month (VEM), it has been exciting to see the partner support around the topic of virtualization and I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s guest post on my blog.

Both AMD and Microsoft are continually asked if virtualization can really become a sustainable technology in the mainstream computing market. Skeptics are quick to point out that the technology world is littered with products that have never made it beyond the early adopter edge of the market. Names like Apple Newton, Betamax, Sega Dreamcast, and OS/2 come up in various articles and discussions about technologies that didn’t become widespread market successes. Will virtualization suffer this same fate? Is it destined to stay on the fringe?

In my opinion, all indications are that virtualization is jumping the technology chasm between early adopters and the mainstream market. Recent survey results from Forrester demonstrate that firms (both large and small) are in the midst of rethinking and overhauling IT infrastructure and client systems. Virtualization is one of technologies at the center of these efforts with Forrester reporting that 54% of the enterprises and 53% of the SMBs surveyed have either implemented x86 server virtualization or plan to do so within the next 12 months—which is significant in today’s current economy.

It is no secret that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions play a critical role in virtualization’s march into the mainstream. In my view, virtualization for Microsoft means helping businesses of all sizes maximize cost savings and improve business continuity with products based on familiar Windows interfaces and well-known Windows-based technologies.

AMD and Microsoft have an on-going technology collaboration designed to integrate our respective hardware and software products to better handle the rigors of memory-intensive virtualization environments. The AMD Opteron processor provides the underlying foundation with AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization technology, along with a broad range of power management capabilities. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 utilize these virtualization and power management technologies to help deliver well performing and highly efficient virtualization solutions. Together, Microsoft and AMD products provide flexible management, optimal user performance, and enable data centers to conserve power through workload consolidation—a big win for any company looking for ways to cut costs and optimize their IT infrastructure.

AMD and Microsoft have already clocked some impressive successes with mid-market companies who are turning virtualization into a business advantage. For example, ServiceU used AMD-based Dell server running Hyper-V to reduce the number of physical servers in its three data centers by 35 percent, and lower the energy utilization at one data center by up to 60 percent—yes, you read that correctly, 60 percent! While WASSER used AMD-based HP blades and Hyper-V to create a virtualized environment that reduced the number of physical servers by more than half without a major sacrifice in performance. With the next versions of Microsoft’s highly anticipated server virtualization products, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, there will be added support for AMD-V Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology. In case you aren’t familiar, RVI enables virtual machines to directly manage memory utilizing hardware resources rather than software resources. This process can help to accelerate the performance of demanding virtualized applications, such as database and Web serving, by reducing hypervisor cycles and the associated performance penalty that is commonly associated with virtualization.

In addition to the virtualization technology coming out of AMD and our technology partners, we’re also seeing a lot of conversation on community sites such as Spiceworks, which I personally think is very indicative to a maturing (and thriving) technology and definitely not one that could ever be in the same category as Pets.com. In fact, I have a feeling if virtualization continues to be the go-to technology for businesses looking to maximize efficiency and streamline their data center, we might start seeing virtualization fanboys start popping up—now wouldn’t that be cool?

Margaret Lewis, Product Marketing Director at AMD

Microsoft customers showcased at VMworld Europe 2009

porourke — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:09:00 GMT

This week at VMworld Europe 2009 we're showcasing a number of European customers who have deployed Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and App-v 4.5. You can watch two videos below.

One is of Bouygues Construction based in France. Bouygues does civil engineering, electrical contracting, and maintenance, employs 51,100 people and operates in more than 80 countries. This video is in French with English subtitles, and includes discussion of their Hyper-V and SCVMM deployment on Dell servers with EMC storage.

The second is Saxo Bank of Denmark. They’re an investment bank, and they used a Web-based trading platform and excellent customer service to drive rapid growth over 10 years, which in turn has led to a rapid expansion in the number of servers required to handle the bank’s data-intensive operations. Saxo Bank has deployed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to consolidate servers in the datacenter. Saxo plans to virtualize nearly all applications over the next few years, with the project expected to produce a 3-year internal rate of return of 150% and a net present value of 5.8 million Danish kroner (~U.S.$1.2 million).

Enjoy. A bientot.

Patrick

Guest post: Hyper-V Performance Scales Well in 24-Core Dell Server

porourke — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:33:00 GMT

My name is Todd Muirhead and I’m one of the engineers behind Dell’s online community for IT professionals – DellTechCenter. This means that I get to work with all of the latest Dell servers and storage and provide technical guidance and assistance to customers. The goal is to help people understand how they can use our products to create solutions. From my techno-geek perspective the cool part is getting to test out all kinds of new stuff.

The most recent example was getting one of our PowerEdge R900 (4-socket, 4U) servers with Intel’s new 6-core E7450 Xeon (aka Dunnington) processors. That totals up to 24-cores in a single server. I got them about 3 weeks before launch and did some performance testing with Windows Server 08 Hyper-V. The design of the tests was to see how much additional performance could be gained with the 6-core processors when moving from 4-core processors. I also measured the power consumption as well to be able to report the results in terms of efficiency with performance per watt. The complete details are in the whitepaper that was published, but a quick summary is that Hyper-V was able to take advantage of the additional processing cores. The R900 with 16 cores was able to support 30 VMs while the R900 with 24 cores was able to support 40 VMs with an increase in performance of 18%. Perhaps most interesting is that power consumption of the R900 actually decreased by 11% when using the 6-core processors, which resulted in a 33% improvement in performance per watt.

The details of the testing methodology and the complete results are in the paper. Please feel free to leave comments with any questions that you have. We also have other resources on delltechcenter for Hyper-V, including video demos of SCVMM and Hyper-V Server.

Todd Muirhead