Improve Your Performance

By VSM News Staff
published: Tuesday, May 06 2008

TM: Good question. First, I think you have to understand a little bit about how virtualization has been implemented in software. Historically, on the X86 platform, virtualization was a software only solution. It’s only been within the past 18 months or so that hardware extensions have been added to help support that solution. So when virtualization was introduced, you have to understand that they X86 platform was built for a single operating system to run, and that operating system believes that it owns all the resources on the machines. So virtual machine manager, something called a hypervisor, was introduced to help manage let’s say, the memory and the resources among multiple operating systems now, that are running on that machine. Where hardware comes into play is to start looking at that and trying to reduce some of the overhead that’s introduced by that software solution. So, to start building in certain extensions, particularly in the way we manage memory, so that the hardware can be aware that it’s being virtualized and take some of that burden or overhead from the software and move that down into the hardware where it was originally in the first place, where that execution was, prior to virtualization. Where AMD comes into play is we’ve added some technology called AMD virtualization, and we’ve added extensions to help that process so the hypervisor can now use extensions that are built directly into the hardware for more efficient handling of memory.

TM: That’s another interesting question. Virtualization certainly, in the outset, was targeted for server consolidation. One of the things we’ve learned over the years is that the server utilization rates are extremely low, surprisingly low, in a lot of datacenters where, in talking to a lot of customers, they’re only using perhaps 3%, 5%, maybe upwards of 10% of the overall capacity of a particular server. So, when you start looking at trying to get better utilization rates, virtualization came into play where now I can start looking at combining and running multiple environments on a single server, thereby upping the utilization rates of the server, reducing the amount of power and the energy consumption it needed to run a particular datacenter. That’s really what was driving a lot of virtualization adoption early on. Once we started implementing virtualization, we looked at the advantages that virtualization brought to the datacenter from a manageability standpoint because virtual environment now are easy to implement – you can provision a virtual server in a matter of minutes, versus weeks, or sometimes even month to provision a physical server.

Virtual environments, virtual machines are very portable – I can move a virtual machine from one physical server to another so I can use it for high-availability and disaster recovery-type solutions. We’re finding that our customers are using virtualization to perform routine maintenance on their physical servers during the middle of the day without any interruption to their service because they can “move” these virtual environments around to other available physical servers, bring the server down, perform the routine maintenance, bring it back up and move the virtual machines back into play. I think what we’re finding is more from the perspective of consolidating, getting better utilization to really changing the way our customers are managing the datacenter, giving them a much more flexible data center.

TM: I think it kind of just evolved, there were solutions out there in the marketplace that from a software perspective, and certainly there has been pressure, all datacenters, from talking to a lot of customers and they were getting an extreme amount of pressure to reduce their power consumption, improve their utilization and respond to business needs in a much more dynamic way and as virtualization began to be introduced, it evolved into something that all of my customers are looking at implementing in some form or fashion. As that happened, and then you look at the hardware side, as we started introducing better ways to integrate with these software solutions, better ways to improve the performance, it just gave us a big advantage there. So it kind of evolved into the something that everybody was looking at.

TM: AMD-V stands for AMD virtualization technology. This was introduced with our dual-core revup processors, back approximately 18-20 months ago, back in the summer of 2007, and what it does is that it introduced a series of extensions that the software-based virtualization solutions can use to instantiate a virtual machine and to help be more efficient in how that virtual solution manages memory. So we’ve added extensions to things within the hardware that make it aware that it is virtualized, thereby really reducing the amount of work a hypervisor needs to perform and, for the newer hypervisor solutions, it’s reduced the amount of work that someone has to do to actually write a hypervisor. So it’s really streamlined the whole area of software-based virtualization.

TM: : Rapid Virtualization Indexing is something we introduced with our Quad-core processor back this fall, so this is the latest extension that we’ve introduced to the market and it is a first, a market-leading technology that we’ve introduced. What it has done is, when Solaris first introduced virtualization, they had to build something called shadow page tables. Page tables within the hardware are what hold basically the translations of virtual memory to physical memory. It’s an area that helps the hardware be more efficient when it goes to do page lookups within memory. As virtualization was introduced, the software then had to create, essentially, copies of those page tables in the memory locations of the software, which is one of the most expensive or, let’s say, more resource intensive processes that had to be performed. What we’ve done now is introduced a hardware-based mechanism where we can move these “shadow” page tables, or page tables, that whole process back down into the hardware. What it’s done, in the end, is enable our customers to virtualize more memory-intensive applications. For example, a lot of our customers started out virtualizing file and print servers and Web servers, and those types of applications that may not have had a huge amount of memory requirements, but with the advent of things like rapid virtualization now, they can start looking at things like virtualizing database applications and email applications. Terminal services is another application that benefits greatly from this extension.

TM: Bar none, every customer that I’ve talked to has either started a project or is planning a large project and is increasing what they’re doing in that area. They are really looking at it to, and again, as we talked about before in the benefits around manageability, really improving how they manage the datacenter. It has given them a way to get better utilization out of their machines; it has given them a way to upgrade their hardware as well. Most of the customers that I’ve talked to are upgrading to dual-core or quad-core machines to run, again, more and more virtual machines on a single server and more resource-intensive applications as well. So, they’re looking at that, they’re looking at getting a more dynamic datacenter, they’re seeing that they can implement disaster recovery solutions, high-availability solutions within their datacenter using virtualization and, at the same time, reducing significantly the power costs that they have in actually running the datacenter.

TM: Without going into the individual features, per se, I think if you look at the difference between AMD and Intel, you’ll see that AMD has always had an advantage in running a higher-performing, more resource-intensive application, even prior to the introduction of AMD-V or AMD Virtualization Technology, we had an advantage based on what we call our Direct Connect Architecture and Integrated Memory Controller. So, the way we handle memory, the way we manage memory gave us a significant advantage. We had better latency, we had better ways to manage those types of applications that processed a lot of data. As we introduced virtualization and these extensions, we were able to take advantage of that architecture. So, if you look at what we introduced, we introduced some very unique features in the area of memory management that apply directly to virtualization. We have rapid virtualization indexing, which are market firsts in the industry, and have enabled our customers to take advantage of, not only the architecture, but these extensions in their virtual environments.

TM: Well, I think it’s only going to grow. You’re seeing more and more mature solutions being introduced out there, whether it be from all of our partners, like VMware or Microsoft or the Xen community. There are just more uses as well. I think you’re going to see customers implement and start to standardize on virtualization. A lot of my customers say that it’s no longer a question of “if” we’re going to virtualize, it’s more of what we’re going to virtualize. In other words, they’re almost justifying ‘why not?’, if they’re implementing a new application, you have to justify what this would not be put in a virtualized environment, as opposed to when it was first introduced, you kind of had to justify why you would. So I think it’s really changing the way datacenter managers are looking at their datacenter and managing their datacenter. We’ve really only hit the tip of the iceberg here. We’ve still only approached a very small part of the market from a virtualization standpoint so I think you’re only going to see this grow, you’re going to see solutions get more and more mature, and you’re going to see more and more mission-critical, large applications in virtualized environments.

TM: You can go to amd.com, under our enterprise solutions and get information on functionality and benchmarks and whitepapers and such like that. You can contact any one of our OEMs and get more information on those solutions, as well as our partners, the software partners as well. There’s a lot of information out there, I’d encourage you to look. This is certainly one of the hot topics in the industry, not only last year, but this year as well.

Related Links:

AMD.com, AMD-V, Rapid Virtualization Indexing