Let's face it–the Intel® Xeon® processor is the world's most widely deployed server for a good reason. IT has grown to rely on Intel Xeon processors for their performance, reliability, virtualization capabilities, and a whole lot more.

And at this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, Intel Senior Fellow Stephen Pawlowski took the stage to discuss the next generation of Intel Xeon processors, codenamed Nehalem-EX. "We've had a number of customers who have come to us and said, 'we want to be able to use Xeon and also the mission critical segment.  What kinds of things or what kinds of capabilities can you put in there?'" spoke Pawlowski in his IDF session. The answer? Intel is throwing a whole lot at Nehalem-EX, all but the kitchen sink.

Designed for mission-critical performance, RAS, along with hardware-based virtualization, Nehalem-EX has got an industry-standard server makeover, with the ability to monitor, report, and recover from hardware errors to maintain data integrity and keep mission-critical services online. And that's just the half of it. With Nehalem-EX, IT and business knows that they've got a solid roadmap they can rely on for years to come.

Nehalem-EX also offers scalability along with world-record virtualization performance, enabling the highest consolidation ratios of any industry-standard server. And as IT departments across the board move to lower costs while increasing hardware utilization, Intel has responded to their needs by improving and enhancing its hardware-based virtualization technology.

Including broad industry support for an era that is increasingly moving towards the cloud, virtualization technology combined with energy-efficient performance and RAS-rich environments provide a reliable, scalable environment that IT departments can bank on. 

If you attended the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on September 22-24, you may have stumbled upon Booth 425 in the Eco-Technology Community. The theme of the booth was Energy Efficient Data Center Power Management with Windows Server* 2008 Hyper-V* and Intel* Dynamic Power Technologies. The demo was a joint project between Microsoft and Intel to showcase the integration of power management features supported by Windows Server 2008 and Intel-based platforms in a virtualized environment.

Logically, development work for the demo consisted in integrating four main technology ingredients: server hardware based on the Bensley platform provisioned with Harpertown CPUs, firmware running on the baseboard of the managed nodes known as Node Manager, virtualized instances of the Microsoft Windows* Server 2008 operating system running on top of the same OS with the Hyper-V virtualization role enabled and a management console application built by Intel, Data Center Manager (DCM).

The relationship between the technology components is shown in the figure below:

I would like to share my personal experience in putting together this demo, an angle not always obvious when looking at the finished product. Personal means people. Let me introduce you to some of the really nice people who participated in the project. This is only a very small portion of the team, so I will apologize up front to team participants not represented here for lack of space.

Here is Susmita Nayak , based in California, who officiated as the project manager greeting some of the booth visitors:

... and here is Haim Cohen, a software engineer based inthe Israel Design Center and yours truly, a technical architect and chief gopher, part of the Oregon team.

The next picture captures an overall view of the booth. It is a pre-conference picture when the setup was almost finished. You may notice the empty boxes, cabling not yet hidden and the rack of servers discreetly tucked on the side. Don't be swayed by rack's apparent small size. The whole rig weighs about 400 pounds (200 kilos). It was shipped to the conference site prefabricated, in one piece. Racking the servers would take about half a day of lifting, bolting, rewiring and sanity testing, which we decided not to do at the conference site.

The demo consisted in four 5U SC5400 managed nodes with a S5000PSL (Star Lake) baseboards running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and hardware virtualization support turned on. The management console server consisted of a S5000PAL baseboard on a 2U chassis running Microsoft Windows Server* 2003. The logic block diagram of the rig is shown below. The configuration of the nodes was similar; node 1 has been expanded for detail.

In addition to the main CPU, the S5000PSL baseboard carries a baseboard management controller (BMC). The BMC is an embedded computer. Node Manager is firmware that runs on the BMC. Data Center Manager actually communicates with the BMC to carry its functions using the server's Ethernet interface. The BMC supports a TCP/IP stack and carries an IP address separate from the CPU. This is necessary to support bare metal management capabilities. The server platform has an instrumented power supply providing real time readouts of the server power consumption. The information is carried through an out-of-band (OOB) network in the baseboard.

Finally, here is the console display of Data Center Manager:

Data Center Manager supports the notion of logical groups. In the picture above the the four servers were placed in two groups, namely Group 1 with one servers and Group 2 with three servers. The graph shows the power consumption over time of server named "Win11". On the left side, the graph starts with the server idling. The workload used in this demo is SPECpower. There are four instances of Microsoft Windows* Server in each physical machine, also running Microsoft Windows* Server 2008. The graph shows an idling power of about 160 watts. SPECpower was scripted to go through a calibration period of a few minutes and then settling at about 50% CPU utilization. Power consumption is proportional to the workload. Hence we see power peaking at 247 watts for a few minutes and settling at 219 watts thereafter. For a more detailed walkthrough of the demo, please take a look at Dialing in your Datacenter - using Intel Dynamic Power Datacenter Manager.

There were quite a few challenges in integrating the various technology components. Windows Server 2008 however, was a standout; its behavior was rock solid throughout in spite of being a recently introduced product. I never experienced hangs with the Hyper-V manager and the system was always good at saying what it was doing. These positive behaviors contributed to the general sense of robustness. A system configured with four virtual machines requires about 120 GB of hard drive space and 8 GB of main memory.

I found Windows Server 2008 very easy to install. Support for the newer platform features was right out of the box. On the other hand I had to tweak the BIOS SATA controller settings into legacy mode before the installation of Windows Server for Windows Server 2003 could proceed. The administrative functions for Hyper-V such as replicating virtual machines were easy to carry out, with Hyper-V Manager taking care of fixing the MAC addresses and SIDs in the clones.