Advanced Virtualization:
Advanced virtualization and workload management have become essential capabilities for optimizing utilization, availability and agility in business computing environments. Itanium 2-based solutions support virtualization on all levels-in the processor, in individual vendor's system architectures and in software-based solutions. This enables IT organizations to choose the best virtualization strategy for their particular requirements, at lower cost and with greater flexibility than traditional RISC architectures.
This paper will discuss the advanced virtualization options on Itanium-based servers, focusing primarily on SWsoft Virtuozzo, a software-based advanced virtualization solution optimized for servers running Windows or Linux. By enabling multiple application stacks to be consolidated safely and securely on a single OS instance, SWsoft provides a lean and efficient advanced virtualization architecture that allows businesses to host large numbers of applications and heavy workloads on each physical server, and to achieve near-native response times.
Workloads can be moved very quickly between virtual partitions, and server resources can be allocated with exceptional granularity and without interrupting production environments. With just a single OS image per server, the software environment is also consolidated, which further reduces complexity and simplifies management.
These advantages make Virtuozzo running on Itanium-based advanced virtualizations ideal for many mission-critical environments, either as the primary advanced virtualization technology, or in addition to the hard and soft partitioning capabilities provided by many system vendors. The relatively low cost of Virtuozzo also complements the flexibility and affordability of Itanium-based servers. With the combined solution, IT organizations have important new options for supporting their most data-intensive and mission-critical applications on an affordable, industry-standard server architecture.
The Power of Advanced Virtualization
In just a few years, advanced virtualization has evolved from a relatively obscure mainframe capability to a mainstream technology that is helping hundreds of thousands of companies improve business responsiveness and IT efficiency. By enabling multiple applications to be hosted safely and securely on a single server, advanced virtualization increases server utilizations rates, often by a factor of ten or more. This not only reduces capital costs, but also cuts down on power, cooling and management expenditures, and helps to extend the life of existing data centers.
Just as importantly, advanced virtualization cuts the link that binds a particular software stack to a particular hardware platform. With appropriate management tools, new applications can be deployed more quickly, workloads can be migrated without downtime between servers, and hardware resources (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) can be adjusted as needed. These capabilities enable IT organizations to provide higher availability at lower cost, and to deliver consistent service levels despite unpredictable workloads.
MULTI-LEVEL SUPPORT ON ITANIUM-BASED SERVERS
Itanium-based servers support virtualization at multiple levels:
- Today's Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Server Virtualization processors include Intel Virtualization Technology, which provides silicon-level support for fundamental virtualization functions. This helps to reduce virtualization complexity, improve performance and increase compatibility across diverse operating systems.
- Many Itanium-based server vendors support advanced virtualization at the system level-
including both hard and soft partitioning capabilities-so IT organizations can consolidate and manage diverse operating systems and applications with considerable flexibility.
Software-based virtualization solutions are also available, providing consistent, cross-vendor capabilities across all Itanium-based servers. IT organizations can deploy these solutions on top of virtualized hardware architectures, to extend builtin capabilities; or they can deploy them on any Itanium-based advanced server virtualization as the primary foundation for virtualization and workload management. Two types of software-based advanced virtualization solutions are particularly important: "hardware virtualization," which enables multiple operating systems to be consolidated on each physical server; and "OS virtualization," which enables multiple applications to be consolidated on a single OS instance per physical server.
OS Virtualization-Ideal for Many Deployments
The majority of today's most popular software-based advanced virtualization solutions are examples of hardware virtualization. They allow IT organizations to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single physical server, by isolating each software stack in a virtual partition. Though the value of this approach has been well documented in many environments, users will typically see a performance overhead due to running many simultaneous OSs.
