A Manager’s Guide to Virtualization

By Christoph Dobroschke of AMD

A growing number of Fortune 1000 companies are using some form of virtualisation. Christoph Dobroschke, Server and Workstation Product Manager at AMD, explains the business benefits that have driven this technology into the mainstream faster than anyone imagined.

As recently as five years ago, virtualization — the utilization of virtual, as opposed to physical, resources such as servers or memory — was deemed expensive, exotic and complex. Today, virtualization has come into its own. A Forrester Research report from 2007 indicates that 51% of enterprises are now using or piloting the technology. This rapid adoption has been dubbed a “megatrend” by many analyst firms, and IT managers ignore the benefits of virtualization at their peril.

The concept of virtualization is not new. It has been a buzzword in the realm of data storage for years. Virtualization technology helps squeeze additional value out of a company’s existing IT investment by increasing the utilization of physical resources. From a processing perspective, virtualization is a method for running multiple operating systems on a single physical computer. In a virtualized environment, a single system could run Microsoft® Windows®, Sun Solaris, Novell Netware and Linux® operating systems simultaneously.
To use a commonly quoted description by Andi Mann of Enterprise Management Associates, “virtualization is making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources. It can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource.”

Enabling IT systems to support multiple operating systems and applications at the same time can help data center managers to operate fewer servers and, importantly, reduce administrative overhead. This can yield significant benefits, including reducing server, storage and networking costs, boosting energy efficiency and enhancing business agility. Virtualization also offers environmental benefits. A single piece of hardware doing of the job of many can consume less power and generates less heat.

System consolidation

A key issue in data center management is that operating expenses — the cost of housing, managing and powering equipment — often consume too much of the annual budget. One way to address this issue is to improve equipment utilization. It is commonly accepted that many data center servers are underutilized, and servers may not come close to peak operating capacity on any given day.

In some data centers, server utilization may be as low as 5 to 15%. In other words, 85 to 95% of system resources could be wasted, clogging the server room not only with a glut of underused servers, but with the associated back-up hardware as well. Virtualization helps companies manage their network environments in a much more dynamic way by enabling consolidation into one simple server architecture and abstracting everything in the data center. Also, by implementing a server consolidation strategy, premium server-room space can be freed up — potentially offering savings in costly real state.

Administrative factors

Furthermore, in a virtualized environment, instead of having to manually set up a server, the virtualization software can deploy a server using a pre-existing template and shift server images from one physical server to another. Servers can seamlessly be created and deleted as needed, resulting in a marked reduction in the time and effort involved.

According to Tim Mueting, virtualization solutions manager at AMD, virtualization gives data center managers a high degree of flexibility in determining how to manage hardware and software platforms.

“One of the key advantages of virtualization is the latitude that it affords the data center manager, as provisioning of a virtualized server can happen in minutes, whereas deploying a physical server could take weeks,” says Mueting. “Another significant advantage is the ease with which virtual machines can be moved from one physical server to another without encountering significant outages, thus minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. It means maintenance updates can now be performed in the middle of the day.”

The use of virtualization for provisioning servers also helps mitigate security concerns within the data center. By containing each application within its own virtual server, applications can be prevented from impacting each other when upgrades or changes are made. Each application can be isolated from the others, promoting security.

Helping reduce energy consumption

At a time when consciousness about global warming is rising, virtualization also helps reduce costs in another key area: energy. Anyone even remotely familiar with networking will recognize that network switches guzzle electric power. An AMD commissioned study reports estimated total datacenter power and electricity consumption for the world to cost $7.2 billion annually, and is expected to grow in the future. Server virtualization can greatly reduce unnecessary hardware. As a result, companies with virtualized IT environments may require less hardware and less energy. From the perspective of corporate citizenship, virtualization use is crucial to maintaining a smaller environmental footprint.

The AMD approach

Virtualization is a memory and compute-intensive technology placing heavy demands on servers not commonly found in many other software environments. In order for virtualized data centers to utilize their computing resources effectively, they need server platforms that can provide a robust and scalable environment for virtualization while maintaining power efficiency. To meet these exacting demands, data centers increasingly turn to specialized hardware-centric technology resources. 

AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology, for example, is hardware-based technology that helps servers to reach higher levels of efficiency and utilization by assisting virtualization software to run multiple operating applications on a single physical AMD Opteron™ processor-based server.

AMD Opteron processor-based servers facilitate the three key things that virtualization demands of a server — computation cycles, memory and I/O bandwidth. The competitive advantage of AMD Opteron processors lies in AMD's Direct Connect Architecture and AMD-V, which allows us to provide strong levels of scalability, by delivering exceptional bandwidth and computation cycles.

“Virtualization is important in the market today and will be even more important in the future,” comments long-term customer of AMD, Günther Aust, Senior Marketing Manager Infrastructure Products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “Customers need better protection and availability, and they need an infrastructure that’s agile and flexible enough to accommodate consolidation and organizational change. The end result is the power for organizations to manage their technology in a way that works for them.”

Fujitsu Siemens Computers also uses HyperTransport™ technology to help maximize the performance of their BX 630 blade servers.

“AMD provides technology that helps us to create servers designed for virtualization,” continues Günther Aust. “For example; we are using the HyperTransport technology protocol across motherboard boundaries in our BX 630 blade system. This allows us to connect two physical two-way blades to create a four-way blade, giving customers great flexibility in managing the amount of CPU power in a server, while also effectively increasing the I/O capacity and the memory capacity compared to two-way server blades. These are critical parts of any virtualization infrastructure.”

Looking ahead

An energy-efficient, cost-effective data center is not optional today; it is a requirement. Virtualization has already dramatically changed the landscape of the modern data center by driving cost-effectiveness, business continuity and higher availability. Analyst reports suggest that businesses are rapidly warming to the idea of virtualization, and one can expect businesses of all sizes to increasingly embrace virtualization strategies as they push toward both more profitable and more “green” operations in the months ahead. 

Butler Group recently estimated that by 2008, server virtualization tools could improve server utilization rates by as much as 25% and 40% over today’s rates – further fuelling speculation that server virtualization will soar in popularity in the coming years. Server virtualization is perhaps likely to become the norm in data centers across the world. As more and more mission-critical applications become virtualized, the virtualized data center may become something of an industry standard.

While a few years ago, managers may have needed to justify why they should virtualize their data centers, today they need to justify why not to virtualize. Both for its manageability advantages and the potential for striking boosts in server efficiency, virtualization today may even be the fastest growing market in the server area and more and more systems being sold to a data centers today will come into contact with virtualization in one way or other.

© 2008 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, AMD Virtualization, AMD-V, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.