At the end of last week AMD announced a breakthrough achievement: migrating a running virtual machine from a virtualization platform to another, each running different CPU brands.
Despite many progresses in this area (AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel Flex Migration), so far the only thing possible was to live migrate VMs between different CPU families of the same vendor.
AMD and Intel never cooperated as much to cross such boundary and in one case we are pretty sure that an Intel executive said that the thing would be unlikely to happen.
Now AMD has found a way to mask the CPU information and operate the migration from an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420 to its own forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron.
To achieve the goal the company worked together with Red Hat so everybody would expect that the migration happened through Xen hypervisors. It’s not the case.
Red Hat fully embraced KVM as replacement of Xen in June and this is the virtualization platform that was used for the demo:
