The Server Room Blog : Authors : IddoK@Intel

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Fall IDF: Have You Seen the Pasta Machine (IOV demos) At Work?

Posted by Iddo Kadim Sep 24, 2009

In my previous post Fall IDF: Is Italian Pasta the Actual Inspiration for Server Virtualization? I talked about the evolution of Server I/O virtualization. I mentioned a few demos and invited you to check them out. But I didn’t give any details about the demos…

Well, it's the 3rd and last day of IDF today and the demos have running now for 2 days. You have one moreday to check them out! So let me describe them quickly.

Dell has been a great partner for these demos. We’re showing 2 demos together in booths 709 and 711 in the Virtualization Community, using Dell’s R710 servers, based on the Xeon 5500 platform, and using Intel 82599 (Niantic) with Virtual Machine Direct Connect (VMDc). The 1^st demo is with VMware and their Network Plug-In Architecture (NPA) technology.

When you visit the demo, check out the great CPU utilization as well VMotion* among heterogeneous server configurations!

The 2^nd demo is delivered with Citrix, showing scalable direct assignment by using XenServer with VT-d and SR-IOV support. The overall performance is really great and live relocation of virtual machines is working nicely.

Another demo (booth 707) is delivered by Red Hat, featuring RHEL 5.4 with KVM (shipping SW with VT-d and SR-IOV support!), Neterion with their 10GbE NIC, all running on an Intel Xeon 5500 server. Look out for the performance value shown for scalable direct assignment!

And finally, a storage (not LAN) demo! Using the same combination of VMM and server, in booth 517, LSI is showing the value of scalable direct assignment for a RAID controller. The performance boost is fantastic!

Check out these demos at the IDF Showcase... I’d love to hear your impressions!

0 Comments Permalink Tags: servers, virtualization, idf_2009, idf_30in30, datacenter, data_center, server_virtualization, io_virtualization

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Fall IDF: Enterprise Cloud? Are you sure it's not an oxymoron?

Posted by Iddo Kadim Sep 21, 2009

I have a confession to make… Last year was my first IDF. Ever! I had no idea then, that this year I would end up being responsible for a whole track, and sponsoring the Virtualization Community zone. I was lucky that Jake took ownership of the community zone. He assembled a great line-up of demos, from a variety of companies. It should be great, go see!

But this blog is about the Enterprise Cloud track. I set out to make it to represent a theme, rather than a collection of loosely related sessions. In my view, this required a mix of depths – an overview session to explain the concepts alongside deep technical sessions. I also thought it would be a great opportunity to gather some industry leaders beyond Intel to talk about Enterprise Cloud vision and the opportunities it presented for the developers community.

“What is this guy talking about” you must be asking yourself. “What is Enterprise Cloud? Not more hype?!” Well, I think of Enterprise Cloud as a very real vision of the place where actual IT needs meet the aspirations of the Cloud Computing hype.

The Cloud hype is based on some pretty impressive efficiencies that several companies are being told to have achieved. These companies did so by designing custom application to run in their data centers. In some of these cases the data centers and the hardware in them were even custom architected and designed to run these applications. IT wants to gain similar efficiencies. But IT can’t throw away all the legacy applications…

In comes Enterprise Cloud, where IT evolves to gain the efficiencies, without losing the legacy investments…

In the Enterprise Cloud track we’ll cover some of the key technologies that are required for this to happen.

We’ll start with an overview (session ECTS001) on Tuesday at 10:15, where Dylan and I will do an overview of key technology areas: virtualization and performance, Data Center efficiency, evolution of I/O, and security, and why they are critical for the evolution of IT. What will follow are several in-depth sessions that will cover those very topics:

· ECTS002 – will focus on Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and explain how application can protected in the Enterprise Cloud environment. Check this out in Jim's blog

· ECTS003 – will cover enhancement for encryption processing in upcoming CPUs. Leslie gives a really great overview in her blog

· ECTS004 – will talk about technologies to improve Data Center efficiency. David covers one of those technologies here and check out his other blogs as well.

· ECTS005 – is an in-depth review of Intel’s technologies for virtualization, and will be presented by Intel Fellow Rich Uhlig.

· ECTS006 – will discuss evolution of I/O, which is necessary to enable IT to gain the desired efficiencies. RK gives an excellent preview in his blog here

· We also have a Q&A session on Tuesday evening (ECTQ001) to allow an open unscripted conversation with all the track presenters who will be around on Tuesday.

· Finally, we have a VERY exciting panel (ECTP001, on Tuesday at 5pm). Jake Smith from Intel will lead a discussion with some true industry thought leaders from Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, and VMware. The Theme of the panel is “Enterprise Cloud – technologies, usages, and opportunities for the developers community”. This should be an exhilarating hour!

Along with a couple of labs this should a great track. See you at IDF… it all starts tomorrow!!!

0 Comments Permalink Tags: virtualization, server, datacenter, idf_2009, i/o_virtualization, datacenter_efficiency, txt, idf_30in30, enterprise_cloud, aes

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Fall IDF: Is Italian Pasta the Actual Inspiration for Server Virtualization?

Posted by Iddo Kadim Sep 17, 2009

I love food! Since I was a kid I’ve loved noodles, especially Italian pasta. I used to think that Spaghetti was the general name for Italian noodles. Learning how to twist Spaghetti on a fork gave a great sense of achievement and joy.

Many years later my wife and I travelled to Rome. Naturally – both of us really love food, we spent a lot of time seeking out restaurants and checking out new food. One of the wonderful dishes we had was Pappardelle (on the left) with Duck Ragu. It was my 1^st encounter with Pappardelle –a very wide form of pasta. You get only a few Pappardelle on your plate but it’s still the same amount of pasta. I found it not as practical to twist the Pappardelle around my fork, so I cut them up into smaller pieces to eat them.

I’ve thought about it recently when I looked at the back of a virtualized server. Looks similar, no? J

A typical virtualized server has 8-10 1Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) ports, and 2 Fibre Channel ports. This makes for a lot of cabling, and many add-in cards. It translates to a lot of cost, power, and complexity (and thus reliability risk) for an IT shop. As a result, there’s a lot of buzz around high-speed networks, specifically 10GbE. That technology presents the opportunity to consolidate all these 1GbE ports to a significantly smaller number of higher bandwidth, i.e. 10GbE ports. It makes for a much tidier server.

Kind of like substituting Pappardelle for SpaghettiJ

In that case, iSCSI or FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) could be used for the SAN connection, still using the same high-speed ports. Standards like Data Center Bridging (DCB) could add a lossless character to the 10GbE link to make it friendlier to FCoE.

Few new solutions though come without new challenges. The common way for VMs to share I/O devices in a today’s environment in through mediation of the hypervisor, using emulation or para-virtualization. That reduces the effective I/O bandwidth. It also becomes a fairly significant overhead to the server in its own right, reducing the available server capacity for application processing, and it adds latency. With the growing trend in IT to treat virtualization as a default deployment mode for any application, these issues become quite limiting.

We at Intel have thought that the best way to overcome these issues is by using “direct assignment”. Using the Intel® VT-d technology (launched in the Xeon 5500 platform), a VM can be assigned a dedicated I/O device. This nearly eliminates the overheard related to the hypervisor mediation I mentioned above. A side benefit is that it increases the VM to VM isolation and security. But assigning an individual I/O device to one VM is not very scalable…

This is where the PCI-SIG’s SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) standard comes into play. This standard allows a single I/O device to present itself as multiple virtual devices. With SR-IOV, each virtual device can be assigned to a VM, adding scalability to the direct assignment model, effectively allowing the physical I/O to be shared yet with greater security and reliability.

Another challenge with the direct assignment model is related to live migration. Hypervisors have typically assumed the SW mediated IOV model. As a result, hypervisors need to be modified to adapt their live migration solutions to direct assignment.

These technologies span many different components of the server platform. Intel® VT-d is necessary, so Xeon 5500 must be used (or later platforms). SR-IOV capable I/O devices – NICs or Storage controllers, are required. BIOS must be modified, as well as hypervisor software. This is pretty heavy lifting.

So you can only imagine how excited I am to be able to showcase 4 different SR-IOV demos at IDF next week! The demos involve 2 server vendors, 3 VMM vendors – 3 different vendors implementing 3 different hypervisor architectures, and 3 different IHVs representing 2 different I/O technologies. We show the performance improvements, as well as VM live-migration. It works!

Come and see it (Booths 517, 707, 709, and 711 in the IDF showcase)!

2 Comments Permalink Tags: idf_30in30, server, 10gbe, idf_2009, virtualization, datacenter, data_center, sr-iov, networking