virtualization.info Editors

There were some things that came out, the first of which was that there will be a Pacifica spec that comes out ‘before the end of the month’. Hopefully, they mean March, but it wasn’t specified as such.

The next bit was that it isn’t totally compatible with VT, or at least that is the strong impression I get. When you ask the question ‘is it compatible’, and you get the answer ‘well, isn’t the weather nice today, how long are you in SF for?’, it becomes clear that they don’t want to say no in public.

AMD did say that its version would be better because it would support all the things that make the K8 line unique. HT, embedded memory controllers, and all the bells and whistles should make for a whopping good time for all the VMM writers out there. With any luck, Pacifica will make it easier.

The last bit was how it plans to introduce it in phases. Before you can buy silicon, most likely around the end of the year, you can get all the Pacifica goodies in Linux. Those that are not gifted with a large corporation that gets alpha silicon, say EMC and MS, will get a dev kit in the form of Xen and Open Hypervisor. Open in front of Hypervisor is new to me, but in any case, you will get a plugin that enables the silicon to function when it comes out.

Xen supports virtualization of x86 hardware for complete separation of virtual machine environments with only minimal decrease in performance. NetBSD/xen can run in both privileged and unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 1.2, and in unprivileged virtual machines under Xen 2.0.

Christian Limpach committed the initial port of NetBSD to Xen to the NetBSD source repository on March 11th, 2004. Since then, enormous progress has been made, allowing the NetBSD Project to show their commitment to their development efforts by deploying NetBSD/xen within the project.

“We use virtualization with Xen every day on the foundation’s own servers,” says Thor Lancelot Simon, a developer and system administrator with The NetBSD Foundation. “It allows us to maintain multiple, isolated environments on a single 1U server. We aren’t naive enough to think that any system has perfect security; but Xen helps us isolate critical systems from each other, and at the same time helps keep our systems physically compact and easy to manage. When you combine virtualization with Xen with NetBSD’s small size, code quality, permissive license, and comprehensive set of security features, it’s pretty clear you have a winning combination, which is why we run it on our own systems.”

NetBSD 2.0 was the tenth major release of the freely available NetBSD operating system and the first to include NetBSD/xen, a port of the NetBSD kernel that runs under the Xen version 1.2 monitor. Significant work to run Xen version 2.0 has recently been completed by Manuel Bouyer and the next release of NetBSD will in all likelihood include this code. The Xen project already supplies a version of NetBSD/xen that runs under later versions of the Xen monitor.

“With our fifth annual Technology of the Year awards, we honor the most enterprising enterprise products, ones that have fundamentally altered the IT landscape,” said Steve Fox, editor-in-chief at InfoWorld.

“VMware created its ESX Server virtualization product for businesses that need truly enterprise-class virtualization. ESX Server implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware,” commented Tom Yager, technical director at the InfoWorld Test Center. “But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs and vanilla operating systems.”

Yager continued, “Those coming down to x86 from Sparc, Power, or PA-RISC hardware should consider no option other than ESX Server. And those running more than a rack’s worth of x86 servers should think seriously about trading some raw performance, so often wasted, for the high-availability, ultimately reconfigurable server infrastructure that this product enables. It’s remarkable – even marvelous – to see VMware carry IT so far with software that fits on two CDs.”

VMware ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments. Adopted by thousands of IT organizations worldwide over the last three years, ESX Server has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in costs through providing server consolidation, fast provisioning and disaster recovery. ESX Server provides a highly scalable platform with advanced resource management capabilities, which can be managed by VMware VirtualCenter. Using VMotion technology, enterprises are able to respond to changing business demands in real-time and move virtual machines from one physical server to another with continuous service availability.

“We are very honored to have received the prestigious InfoWorld 2005 Technology of the Year award,” said Karthik Rau, director of product management at VMware. “We take tremendous satisfaction in seeing thousands of enterprises deploy our virtual infrastructure software in ways that drive real value and solve real problems. The InfoWorld award reaffirms what our customers have been telling us all along – that enterprises are looking at VMware virtual infrastructure as a critical technology layer for all their x86 based systems.”

As part of the expanded relationship, the two companies will collaborate on optimization of VMware server and desktop products working with Intel’s future chip-level virtualization technologies. The end result for enterprise users will be a robust, optimized set of operating system-agnostic virtual infrastructure solutions that leverage VMware’s seven years of extensive technology innovation and leadership in delivering high performance, production-ready virtualization products for the Intel architecture.

The current results of this collaboration can be seen at the Spring 2005 Intel Developer Forum where VMware products running on Intel’s Virtualization Technology (formerly codenamed Vanderpool Technology) prototypes will be showcased during Intel keynotes and in the solution pavilions. VMware will incorporate product support for Intel’s Virtualization Technology as it becomes available in Intel microprocessors.

“The combination of Intel Virtualization Technology and VMware’s virtualization expertise and products will lead to truly compelling usage models for enterprise computing,” said Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel. “Virtualization has reached a point of real maturity in the server space and will bring exciting new applications to enterprise clients including increased manageability, improved ease of use and enhanced security. We look forward to VMware’s support of Intel’s Virtualization Technology.”

“We are pleased that Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is adding virtualization support in the hardware. VMware endorses this move as it further validates the significance of our core market. We are excited to work with Intel to make future hardware technologies more virtualization-friendly and optimized for VMware products,” said Diane Greene, President, VMware. “We are looking forward to our increased co-operation as market leaders to proliferate the most advanced and robust virtualization solutions for the enterprise.”

“(Virtualization) is kind of like a swiss army knife,” said Greg Bryant, a director of marketing in Intel’s digital enterprise group. “It can be used for a lot of things.”

It’s true enough that virtualization has become very popular in the server market. VMware, in particular, has earned heaps of praise for being able to run multiple OSes on the same server. The case for similar technology on the desktop is less clear.

Connectix – now owned by Microsoft – does make a VirtualPC product that lets Mac users run Windows software and lets Windows users run old applications on their new computers.

Intel expects to see some business users build on these concepts. Companies might, for example, set up one partition that can run only approved software. Users can install iTunes or Doom or whatever unsafe software they like in another partition. Software makers might also create a type of “service operating system” that could be accessed no matter what has happened to the main copy of Windows or Linux.

“This lets you isolate the systems and recover if there is a malicious attack,” Bryant said.

What do consumers get?

Well, they can partition off the operating system into “for adult” and “for children” compartments.

“I really don’t want my kids messing with the Quicken files we use to pay our bills,” said Bill Leszinske, a director of marketing in Intel’s desktop group. Leszinske would return to this bad child theme again and again.

PC makers might also try and fine tune their systems to handle certain functions better. Why go through the time and trouble of booting Windows when you just want to play a DVD? Here comes the instant-on DVD partition, Leszinske said.

While the Intel marketeers did provide a couple of useful suggestions, they didn’t have answers for some of the more difficult questions posed by the IDF crowd. Things like, “Do we really need separate partitions for our evil children? Doesn’t a separate login do the trick today?” “What happens when Microsoft wants us to pay for four licenses for our four partitions?” “Do we install Norton four times?” “How about Service Pack 3?”

“There are some of the tough things we have to get to,” Leszinske said.

So far, this type of technology seems much more useful in the server world. It’s not at all clear that consumers need to do lots of PC carving. That is unless you have really crap kids, apparently.

At the Intel Developer Forum here this week, Intel Corp. has been showing demonstrations of its Intel Virtualization Technology—formerly code-named “Vanderpool”—which is due to start appearing later this year in desktop chips and 64-bit Itanium processors, and next year in its Xeon server chips and mobile processors.
For its part, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices Inc.) will release the specification for its “Pacifica” virtualization technology later this month.

The technology will start appearing in AMD 64 processors in mid-2006, said Margaret Lewis, commercial software strategist for the chip maker.

Virtualization decouples the operating system from the hardware, letting users run multiple operating systems on individual servers or pool multiple systems into a single virtualized pool, leading to greater flexibility in how IT resources are used.

It has been commonplace in mainframe and Unix systems for many years, but the way x86 processors are built has made it difficult and cumbersome to bring virtualization into that space.

Companies such as VMware Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are enabling it on a software level. With the new technologies promised in upcoming Intel and AMD processors, virtualization capabilities in the x86 and Itanium space will grow, officials at both companies said Wednesday.

Virtualization is among a number of technologies that Intel is embedding into its processors as it focuses more on a platform approach to its products. Other technologies include dual-core processing, Intel Active Management and I/O Acceleration technologies.

At separate panel discussions here Wednesday, the two chip makers said the enhanced virtualization will lead to easier server consolidation, greater security, and better system and software utilization.

For example, users will be able to more easily create separate partitions on a single box that can be isolated from each other, reducing the likelihood that a virus in one partition will spill over into the other or onto the network, said Greg Bryant, director of planning and marketing for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group.

Businesses looking to migrate legacy applications onto newer x86 servers will be able to create a partition on the server that will hold the legacy data, while another partition on the same server can be used to migrate the data to the new platform, AMD’s Lewis said.

In addition, having virtualization capabilities in the CPUs will increase the performance of virtual machines created through software from VMware and Microsoft, the chip makers said.

Intel and AMD are getting support from VMware and Microsoft in their virtualization pushes. Lewis said she envisions more software makers creating virtualization offerings that will run on the chip makers’ platforms, which will spur wider adoption among users.

“Once we get more and more users using the software … you’ll get them saying, ‘If it can work here, why can’t it work there?'” Lewis said at an AMD-led panel discussion at a hotel a few blocks away from the IDF convention. Also on the panel were representatives from VMware and Sun Microsystems Inc., which is building up a portfolio of servers running AMD’s 64-bit Opteron processors.

However, while the technology generated a lot of discussion at IDF, it raised a number of questions, including how well it would complement the software offerings from VMware and Microsoft.

“The question is, how much does it improve those products, and the answer today is, I don’t know,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. “VMware implies it isn’t really much, but you just don’t know.”

Haff also cautioned users not to assume that they will be able to create virtual machines simply by running systems that offer chip-based virtualization. “You’re still going to need to make an investment in software,” he said.

There also is the question of how software makers will license their products that are running on virtual machines. Martin Reynolds, an analyst with Gartner Inc. and moderator of the Intel panel discussion, said that will be a key challenge for software makers going forward. Users will not want to be charged a fee for every virtual machine the software runs on.

VT is expected to debut next quarter when Intel launches ‘Smithfield’, its dual-core Pentium desktop processor, a year ahead of the company’s original release schedule.

Smithfield also got its go-to-market name today: it will ship as the Pentium D.

VT allows one processor to run multiple operating systems – or multiple instances of the same OS – simultaneously. It’s a technique long used in mainframe systems. Enterprises are generally happy to run whatever OS a particular app happens to require, so they often need to maintain multiple OSes, ideally on the same hardware to save money.

That’s not the case with desktop users – dual-booting Linux geeks being the most common exception; so you might think VT has less of a role in desktop usage scenarios than Intel might like us to believe.

Think of users running a Windows-based media server, one on VT-hosted virtual machine, while playing a 3D game in a second Windows instance on a second virtual machine, Frank Spindler, Intel’s industrial technology programs director, said yesterday. That way if the game hangs, you don’t lose the server functionality.

Maybe. Or you could just run an operating system with decent memory protection, so that the crashing game doesn’t bring down the whole system with it.

Whatever. The Pentium D has VT, whether you need it or not, and with launch day approaching, the technology needs a better go-to-market name than Vanderpool. Hence the new tag.

Xen is an Open Source hypervisor, spun-out from the University of Cambridge and developed and maintained by XenSource, Inc, that allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on the same physical server, reducing the complexity of data center management and cost of ownership. Today the hypervisor must manage the complexity of operating system virtualization in software. Intel processors enhanced with Intel Virtualization Technology enable the hypervisor to efficiently run multiple operating systems, including unmodified legacy operating systems, in independent, isolated partitions. With virtualization, one computer system can function as multiple “virtual” systems. With enhancements to Intel’s various platforms, Intel Virtualization Technology can improve the robustness and performance of today’s software-only solutions. Xen 3.0 is targeted for availability early in the third quarter of this year, and will also include support for 64 bit processors and Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) guest operating systems.

“Intel Virtualization Technology, with a Xen-based hypervisor, helps allow the platform to natively support multiple operating systems and applications, and in particular makes it possible for the Xen hypervisor to run unmodified operating systems,” said Philip Brace, General Manager Marketing, Server Platform Group of Intel Corporation. “We plan continued support for the Xen project, and will work with XenSource and the Xen community to help ensure that Intel Virtualization Technology enabled Xen is available coincident with Intel platform availability.”