virtualization.info

As announced virtualization.info is present at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco this year to cover live general sessions for all three days.

In few minutes this post will be updated to reflect announcements made by Diane Greene, VMware President, and her guests: Patrick Gelsinger, Intel SVP and GM, and Hector de J. Ruiz, AMD Chairman and CEO.

Diane Greene, VMware President

She starts announcing ESX Server 3i and shows a live demo of it running on a Dell PowerEdge, along with Mark Jarvis, Chief Marketing Officer at Dell.

On stage there is a complete rack of Dell machines, an IBM system and a HP system. On the background the ESX Server starts on a 2 x Dual Core AMD Opteron system with 16GB of RAM.

(moderate applause)

(while Diane is showing a long list of of endorsement videos from top industry OEMs, the press department releases a confirmation that VMware acquired Dunes. virtualization broke the news on Sunday)

Now she mentions new Site Recovery Manager product.

It will allow virtual infrastructure backup on a remote cold site (Diane shows a coast to coast backup and restore example) through integration with 3rd party solutions.

She closes her keynote part mentioning virtual desktop, virtual appliances and green computing initiatives. No official announcement for upcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

Patrick Gelsinger, Intel SVP and GM

He says Intel recognizes several virtualization usage models: static server consolidation, multi-OS workstation, dynamic load balancing (meaning capability to automatically move workloads depending on demand), high availability / disaster recovery and in future mainframe migration.

New features of Intel processors are shown: FlexMigration, Extended Page Tables, Virtual Processor IDs.

Now he details future technical challenges of virtualization: I/O Virtualization, Energy Efficiency, Reliability, Metering and Quality of Service, Security and Fault Tolerance.

Back on Intel virtualization features Patrick shows Intel VT-d architecture, supported on Intel Platforms since this year, and new Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq), which reduces CPU utilization acting on network interfaces cards.

He closes with a mention of the new Intel quad-core Xeon 7300, showing 30% better performances and scalability when used with ESX Server (benchmarked with Intel vConsolidate).

Hector de J. Ruiz, AMD Chairman and CEO

He starts talking about AMD efforts in green computing creating energy efficient solutions. AMD achieved 76% reduction in power consumption in its Austin datacenter with 7 ESX Server 3.0.

(big applause)

He now mentions AMD estimation for near future: 15% shipped servers will be for virtualization purposes within 2010, with a $20 billion spending by that time.

On stage now Leendert va Doorn, Senior Fellow at AMD, to introduce new AMD quad-core Opteron (codename Barcellona).

He start talking about new AMD nested paging technology called Rapid Virtualization Indexing.

He also covers tomorrow’s datacenter, completely virtualized, where disaster recovery and manageability become the most important things.

That’s all for today’s keynote. Biggest announcements are probably set for tomorrow’s keynote, performed by John T. Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO, and last day’s keynote, performed by Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist.