Year: 2005

With the Pacifica technology, as well as Intel’s rival offering dubbed “Vanderpool,” the software needed will be built into the chip itself. While basic software is still required to switch between operating systems, the programs will be less complex and more secure than older methods.

“AMD has taken an inclusive approach to Pacifica by previewing it to the virtualization ISV and analyst community. This ongoing collaboration, including today’s disclosure, will ultimately provide Pacifica users with an even richer feature set and a higher performance model for hosting hypervisor-based virtualization solutions,” AMD vice president Marty Seyer said.

Initially, the company will only put the technology on its AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. These Pacifica-enabled chips are expected to hit the market in the early part of 2006. Software makers, however, will get a full preview of the specifications in April.

As techies hail the speed milestones being reached by IntelINTC and Advanced Micro DevicesAMD, many overlook an awkward reality: Most of that silicon brainpower isn’t being used.

VMware President Diane Greene aims to change that. Her Palo Alto, Calif., company is bringing a technology called virtualization — once the sole domain of mainframe computers — to the masses.

The VM stands for virtual machine, a technique that fools software into thinking that one computer is really two, three or a score of machines. This lets firms run lots of software on a single system rather than having to buy a separate machine for every application — and see the PCs sit idle most of the time.

The upshot: Companies can do more with less.

Virtualization isn’t new. But VMware made it possible for the first time on cheap PC servers.

Today, VMware has partnerships with all of the major server vendors and chipmakers. With the chipmakers, the pacts make it easy for VMware to run with chips made by Intel and AMD. Many of the server makers, meanwhile, resell VMware with their hardware.

In 2003, data gear maker EMC bought the company. VMware operates as an independent subsidiary.

Greene recently spoke with IBD about virtualization.

IBD: Why does this technology matter?

Greene: It puts in a layer of software that allows you to manage your hardware separately from your software. That gives you incredible power to do all the management functions better and in ways that were not possible before. It’s a better way to compute and a profound way to give hardware independence to the software.

IBD: More tangibly, what makes this so attractive to server vendors, let alone customers?

Greene: It’s a huge (cost of ownership savings of) 20% to 30% typically — some people say it’s up to 80%. It’s also a huge timesaver.

IBD: Describe the virtualization market.

Greene: In the (market for machines powered by Intel or compatible chips), VMware is the undisputed leader. We created the market and we definitely lead it. We have a strong track record of moving our road map and technology forward pretty aggressively. We have 3 million users and 10,000 enterprise customers. Many of our customers use it on more than 50% of their Intel servers.

IBD: Who are your rivals?

Greene: Of course, the IBMIBM mainframe has virtualization. Then there’s virtualization on the (IBM) pSeries. And Sun (MicrosystemsSUNW ) has built this “container” functionality into Solaris (its server operating system) for their Unix systems. Those tend be a different set of applications and uses than what people are doing with us in the Intel space. Certainly MicrosoftMSFT is coming into this space.

IBD: Does that worry you?

Greene: Ultimately we’re going to work well with Microsoft. We’re doing good things for Microsoft. In the Intel space, bringing in a lot of mainframe-style functionality has helped accelerate x86 (Intel-compatible) adoption into data centers (most of which run Microsoft Windows). So we’re going to want our systems to work together and go to market together. But today, they’re coming in competitively.

IBD: How much of your software goes into Microsoft Windows-based systems?

Greene: Windows dominates, just as it does in the industry. But we have a substantive set of Linux customers. Then we have a lot of customers in mixed environments: Linux and Windows and NovellNOVL. And we’ve got experimental support for Solaris on x86.

IBD: Is that mix changing?

Greene: We’ve certainly seen a rise in Linux over the years that’s been fairly dramatic. And it’s going to be very interesting to watch Solaris x86 to see what happens there. We’re getting more and more demand for it.

IBD: Who are your partners?

Greene: HP (Hewlett-PackardHPQ ), IBM and DellDELL are three of our strongest partners. We’ve been working with them for years. We work with all the storage vendors, all the Intel vendors, the chip vendors and the system management vendors like CA (Computer AssociatesCA) and BMC SoftwareBMC .

IBD: Your parent, EMC, competes with several of those companies. How do you manage that web of relationships?

Greene: When EMC bought us, we were treated as an independent subsidiary, because our partnerships are so key to what we do. We’re about running on any (Intel-compatible) hardware and any operating system. For the first six months, everybody thought maybe (VMware’s independence from EMC) will change. Now it’s clearly established that that’s the way it is and it’s not going to change. Since the acquisition, we’ve been able to grow our relationships with IBM and HP.

IBD: Do you collaborate with EMC or maintain a separation?

Greene: We have to (have separation) because of our partnerships, because we do co-development with our partners. In the same way, we do co-development with EMC. When people do server consolidation, they generally do storage consolidation. A lot of EMC (storage-area networks) are working with VMware virtual infrastructure.

IBD: You just signed a deal with Intel. What impact will this have on your company and technology?

Greene: We’ve been working with Intel almost since the beginning. We’ve taken it a step up in that we’re going to collaborate around (Intel’s VT) virtualization technology. They’re putting support in their chip set. The first incarnation of VT is due out this year on the desktop and next year on the server.

IBD: How does Intel’s input help?

“AMD has taken an inclusive approach to Pacifica by previewing it to the virtualization ISV and analyst community. This ongoing collaboration, including today’s disclosure, will ultimately provide ‘Pacifica’ users with an even richer feature set and a higher performance model for hosting hypervisor-based virtualization solutions,” said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of the Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD. “By enhancing virtualization at the processor level, and building on the success of industry-leading AMD64 technology, we believe that ‘Pacifica’ is vital to the development of best-in-class virtualization solutions.”

“Pacifica” will extend AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture to enhance the virtualization experience by introducing a new model and features into the processor and memory controller. Designed to enhance and extend traditional software-only based virtualization approaches, these new features will help reduce complexity and increase security of new virtualization solutions, while protecting IT investments through backward compatibility with existing virtualization software.

By enabling a platform to efficiently run multiple operating systems and applications in independent partitions, essentially allowing one compute system to function as multiple “virtual” systems, “Pacifica” is designed to provide foundation technologies to deliver IT resource utilization advantages through server consolidation, legacy migration and increased security. Information about “Pacifica” is immediately available at www.amd.com/enterprise.

AMD’s commitment to provide the industry with superior technology to enable virtualization solutions is demonstrated through strategic alliances with partners including Microsoft, VMware and XenSource.

“Businesses and consumers have rapidly adopted Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual Server 2005 for scenarios ranging from development and test simulation to production server consolidation,” said Rob Short, corporate vice president, Windows® Division at Microsoft Corp. “We are excited about AMD’s focus on enabling technologies such as ‘Pacifica,’ and are working with them and other partners to ensure our software virtualization solutions for the Windows platform will leverage these underlying hardware advancements. Processor virtualization extensions are an important building block for future virtual machine solutions on the Windows platform.”

“Leveraging seven years of technology innovation and leadership in virtualization, VMware today delivers production-ready virtual infrastructure products for AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers and AMD Athlon™ 64 processor-based desktops,” said Paul Chan, vice president of Research and Development, VMware. “We’re pleased to continue collaborating with AMD on virtualization technologies such as ‘Pacifica’ to optimize future AMD64 technologies for our products and further expand the deployment of virtualization in the data center.”

Oddly enough, it looks like the effort would be done outside the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), through which most of the big companies have been pushing their wish lists for Linux.

The consortium might be announced at the next Linux open source show in the next few weeks.

CA has reportedly been approaching the usual suspects, companies such as IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, along with some of the other ISVs.

Under the terms of the deal, corporate users buying any BladeCenter server get evaluation copies of VMware’s suite that are good for six months. At the end of that period, users can decide whether to buy or not to buy the suite, which includes VMware ESX Server, VMware Virtual SMP, and VMware VirtualCenter with VMotion.

“What we found is that people who use it [VMware’s suite of virtual products], appear to have a propensity to deploy it. This is something that IBM and VMWare are doing jointly because we have found that in working with IBM over the past four years, there is a high degree of synergy between blade server users and virtualization users,” said Brian Byun, VMware’s vice president of alliances.

Users will have the right to deploy the evaluation products on as many as two blade servers, according to Byun.

The combination of BladeCenter servers running VMware’s products is intended to allow corporate users to virtualize server platforms on which to deploy their mission critical applications and Web-based services, thereby lowering cost of ownership through reducing the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure, according to spokespeople for both companies.

On IBM’s Intel-based servers, VMware already provides the partitioning technology for IBM’s Virtualization Engine technology, which makes consolidating workloads from existing higher-end servers onto less expensive servers easier, company officials claim.

IBM officials believe the real value of the deal to users will be that VMware’s products will work well with the management software they already include with each blade server, namely the IBM Director.

“Last year we introduced a component (part of IBM Director) called the Virtual Machine Manager that works with VMware’s VMotion and Microsoft’s (Profile, Products, Articles) virtual manager. But VMware’s (product) is interesting because it has a traditional partitioning scheme to cut up a processor into multiple machines, but also gives you a management scheme for scale-out applications, making them easier to manage as you add more blades,” said Tim Dougherty, director of IBM’s eServer BladeCenter products. “We have architected things so that all this is manageable from a single piece of glass,” he said.

Dougherty believes that the management scheme will prove to be the capability that convinces many users to deepen their commitment to a range of different virtualization strategies over time.

One user appeared to agree with Dougherty on the value of improved management capabilities for virtual infrastructure software.

“It [VMware’s virtual infrastructure] makes a server environment more manageable as well as redundant. It can also boost efficiency because blades take up half the space of more traditional 1U servers,” said Carlo Bonura, a technical system analyst for Dean Health System, a provider of integrated medical services, insurance, and research.