Choosing the Right Hardware for Server Virtualization

Short Description
Currently, virtualization is one of the most talked about new technologies in IT infrastructure. The ability to virtualize servers and reclaim, up until now, excess capacity has caught the interest of datacenter managers who are facing difficult power and cooling problems, the need to add more IT capacity to react to market changes, or a lack of significant capital resources. The server virtualization marketplace has been evolving rapidly over the past few years, and IDC has seen customer attitudes and stances toward virtualization mature rapidly as well. Virtualization is changing the landscape of the x86 IT world as we know it. Virtualization has made every vendor up and down the software and hardware stacks consider the impact on the architectural design of its product and the go-to-market model it uses. This changing marketplace has manifested itself with new requirements for virtualization products.

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Hardware Innovation
Next-generation x86 virtualization will take advantage of hardware assistance being built into processors by chip vendors, in the form of Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD’s AMD-v CPU virtualization technology. Neither Intel’s VT nor AMD’s AMD-v CPU virtualization technology eliminates the requirement for virtual machine technologies from Xen, Microsoft, Parallels, VMware, or others; rather, these technologies make virtualization enablement robust and easier to accomplish with better performance. The processor vendors accomplish this by changing the relative privilege where the virtual machine software layer is installed, enabling the operating system layers to continue to use the privilege level normally utilized by the operating system.
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Software for implementing “virtual machines” (hypervisors) and virtual server infrastructure is technology that is now spreading rapidly on x86 platforms. x86 virtualization is also progressing in terms of use cases, technology, and maturity. The first phase of customer adoption of virtualization is really a continuation of a trend in the industry that began in 2000. Predominantly, this phase involved IT simplification. Following the economic downturn, customers recognized that there was a need for datacenter consolidation, physical server consolidation, and asset inventory. Physical server consolidation began to merge with virtualization, and customers began to do legacy rehosting of nonsupported operating environments, like Windows NT4, to get the benefits of the new hardware power that was available to them.
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