This joint Intel white paper explores how to address virtualization in an environment with high I/O. The paper includes a technology overview, network concerns and explains how Virtuozzo and Intel are well suited for the high I/O environment.
White Paper
M a r c h 2 0 0 6
Virtualizing High Network I/O Environments
Introduction Virtualization Addresses Key Challenges Every enterprise can benefit from improving the Facing IT Todayutilization of IT resources. Improved utilization not IT organizations everywhere face daily challenges: Do more only helps reduce costs but can also simplify IT with less. Respond to new initiatives faster. Reduce downtime. infrastructure, leading to reduced operations costs. Sound familiar? A growing number of enterprises are finding A virtual computing infrastructure can provide the that server virtualization is a proven way to better utilize features that enable these benefits. At the same time, equipment, keep management, administrative, and overhead a virtual infrastructure can heighten the availability of costs in check, improve availability of resources, and provide mission-critical applications and improve IT agility to a flexible infrastructure that accommodates rapid change to respond to business needs. Virtuozzo* software provides business needs.a high-performance, low-overhead environment for Increased server utilization improves return on virtual computing infrastructures; the low overhead on investmentVirtuozzo makes it ideal for I/O-intensive applications Due to a one-application-per-server deployment philosophy, such as databases. To maintain the reliability, most distributed servers operate at low levels of utilization. flexibility, and performance that a high I/O virtual Virtualization enables the workload from multiple servers to infrastructure provides, physical servers hosting run on the same physical server node, taking advantage of virtual machines need multiple, high-throughput that unused processing power. Virtualization makes existing network connections. This is an ideal environment for server resources available for doing more work, which allows the use of connection-dense Intel® PRO/1000 multiport you to get more done with what you already have. Each virtual gigabit and Intel® PRO/10GbE 10-gigabit Ethernet machine provides an isolated operating environment for use by network adapters. applications and users. A server virtualized in this way can be 60 to 80 percent utilized, which is expected to lower the server investment required to handle a given amount of work.
Virtualization lowers total cost of ownershipIn addition to reduced capital costs, the fewer physical servers and reduced data center complexity required by virtualization can also reduce administrative costs. Virtualized server management tools can contribute to improved administrative productivity. With a small set of server management tools that are standardized across the enterprise, training costs can be reduced. Also, fewer servers can reduce the IT infrastructure footprint and associated utility costs for power and cooling. A virtualized infrastructure improves application Introducing Virtuozzo*availability Virtuozzo from SWsoft is server virtualization software that Application availability is essential to ongoing mission- makes very efficient use of hardware and operating system critical operations. Server virtualization helps keep business (OS) resources. Virtuozzo employs a technology known as OS operations running smoothly by providing the tools to migrate virtualization to define, configure, and operate multiple virtual a virtual machine to a different physical host with a service private servers (VPSs) in a single hardware node, as shown in interruption of only a few seconds-eliminating hours of Figure 1.downtime when planned maintenance needs to be performed. Virtuozzo is available for Microsoft Windows Server* 2003 and In the case of an equipment or application failure, a virtual multiple Linux* distributions, and runs on platforms based on machine on another physical host can be provisioned and Intel® Pentium® processors, 64-bit Intel® Xeon® processors, and started in minutes. Backup data can be restored to the new Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. Virtuozzo supports multiprocessor session quickly, minimizing downtime. configurations with up to 32 processors and 64 GB of memory. The result is increased application availability, as application The virtualization technique employed by Virtuozzo (see sidebar outages in a virtualized environment are reduced to minutes on page 3) uses a single, unmodified image of the OS to host all or hours instead of days. VPS sessions. ... [download for more]
