(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com) was on-site at the Intel Xeon 5500 Series processor launch, where VMware alliance marketing manager Anne Catambay explained how VMware’s software features mesh nicely with Intel’s (www.intel.com) new hardware, making for an energy efficient combo.
“Customers will save money,” Catambay said, “something everybody is looking to do right now…with higher virtual machine density, significant savings will occur in the areas of power, cooling, and space, when customers are running their virtualized applications on the new Xeon 5500 series.”
She notes that VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler, when run on the 5500 series, contributes to higher levels of data center energy efficiency and savings because it continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines according to their various business needs.
VMware has incorporated Enhanced VMotion into Intel’s VT Flexmigration, making it possible to move workloads between different Intel processor generations, expanding the pool of virtualized resources, according to Catambay. “If you are running older Intel processors in your data center and need to refresh them, you will be able to immediately migrate production application workloads to the new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series-based servers when they are rolled into the data center.”
VMware is also making the most out of the Xeon 5500′s hyper-threading capability, which doubles the number of threads each core can execute during a single clock cycle. “This increases the number of Virtual machines you can run per socket – maximizing virtual machine density, and lowering your data center power footprint even farther,” Catambay said.
Intel’s directed I/O virtualization technology, Intel VT-d, ensures improved I/O resources isolation for greater reliability, security, and availability. Intel VT-d is further enhanced when combined with VMware’s VMDirectPath, which increases the performance of network intensive applications running inside VMware virtual machines by providing the necessary address translation and isolation and protection for the software.
“This allows the virtual machine to directly interact with underlying physical network device and frees up the CPU to run additional tasks,” Catambay said. “This special use case minimizes hypervisor overhead and provides access to the full bandwidth of the IO device – a particularly interesting benefit as we move towards 10 Gigabit Ethernet.”
Also, VMware’s fault tolerance, which eliminates even the smallest data loss or disruption, finally has hardware to support it, according to Catambay. “The Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series is the very first system that leverages this new technology from VMware, resulting in 100 percent guaranteed service levels.”
The integration of many features with Intel’s new processor highlights VMware’s longtime relationship with Intel in designing, manufacturing and optimizing infrastructure to handle data center requirements. Also, in July 2007, Intel bought a $218.5 million stake in VMWare.
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