Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

• Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
• Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
• Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
• Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
• Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
• Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations 

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

     As I’m new to The Server Room, I offer this brief introduction:  I am a marketing manager in Intel’s Software and Services Group – looking after Intel’s collaborative marketing efforts with virtualization solution providers.

     A couple weeks ago, Ken Lloyd blogged about the incredible changes in compute capability and performance brought by the Nehalem microarchitecture – and gave credit to the advances in software, too.  I’d like to take the conversation a step further:  did you know that the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 in April 2009 represented a milestone of collaborative development?  The combination of VMware vSphere and Intel Xeon processor 5500 based systems delivers astonishing performance in part because it is the result of a full cycle of collaboration.

     Intel has a well established rhythm of technology innovation – and a lot of really smart architects who know a thing or two about cpu design – but we get innovative ideas from the outside, too.  Over the years of the VMware alliance, Intel has received (and acted on) many requests for small changes in cpu circuitry…changes that would make virtualizing the cpu easier, more efficient, or add capability.  A whole raft of hardware optimizations for virtualization were included in the Nehalem architecture.  As Intel started to deliver early silicon for Xeon 5500 based platforms, Intel software engineers worked closely with VMware engineers – optimizing vSphere code to take advantage of the new hardware features to improve performance, increase efficiency, and add new functionality.  The results?  Check out this video from the launch of VMware™ vSphere 4.0 to see for yourself what “better together” really means.  And the cycle continues – what can you imagine in the next round of collaborative innovation??

In the management practices of most datacenters I see IT driving more efficiency from their infrastructure by switching to virtualization. As they do so and develop confidence over the years, the types of applications that are getting deployed with virtualization are also changing. Even the scalable enterprise apps are being considered as good candidates for virtualization.

IT managers now have the building blocks to consider deploying scalable enterprise apps using virtualization with increasing SMPness in VMM’s like 8-way vCPU capability in VMware vSphere, Intel Xeon virtualization hardware assists, NICs with virtualization hardware assists, and scalable system architectures based on Intel Xeon from IBM such as 3850, 3950 and BladeCenter servers. VMware HA and DR solution and chipset architecture with reliability and availability features further provide the confidence for business critical needs of enterprise apps. Capabilities such as VMware VMotion and FlexMigration help increase efficiency of the infrastructure with such environment.

Economic condition at the same time is also putting more pressure on the IT to deliver more value within a constrained budget. Refreshing old hardware and adopting virtualization are simple strategies to achieve such goals.

I’ll be talking about virtualization with the new VMware vSphere on IBM Intel processors on August 12, 1 PM EST.  I’ll be joined by Bob Zuber, Program Director, High Performance, IBM.   The webinar is designed to help IT managers better understand scalable virtualization infrastructure, enterprise application virtualization, reduced TCO, and efficiency benefits along with a special financing opportunity. 

Register for the session on “Virtualize with the new VMware vSphere on IBM Intel processors and take advantage of special financing”.

In the meantime, I’ll be answering related questions leading up to the webcast, and during the webcast.  I’d also like to hear how you’re delivering more value in the data center within a constrained budget. 

So, its not clear from this posting whether VMware's "Code Central" was announced or escaped but this looks to be a very valuable repository for sharing vSphere scripts.

I'm a recent convert to the wonders of creating new capabilities through the vSphere SDK. Our team has been using it to prototype some interesting new usages for power aware virtualization that we hope eventually will find their way into the VMWare Distributed Power Management (DPM) tool.

The most interesting usage is what we call "platooning" where different server resource pools are kept in different power states from fully powered on through power capped to standby and full off. Servers are moved from one platoon to the next (and workloads are migrated onto them) based on a set of policies for required application capacity headroom and power on latency as load increases. Our belief is that, by carefully designing these policies, we'll be able to save significant power across the data center without impacting peak throughput or response time of any of the applications.

Unfortunately, we don't have the data to demonstrate this savings yet. That's where the SDK comes in. We're able to prototype the usage, collect the data, validate the feasibilty and, if it never shows up in DPM, still be able to implement it in production.

We're just coming up to speed on the SDK, having completed our first "Hello World" integration with it but we think its going to be a very valuable tool for experimenting and going to production with many new usages. I'm hoping Code Central provides a good source of examples to help bootstrap our development.

Are you a developer writing applications to run on the Solaris operating system?. Are you looking for ways to optimize your Solaris solution on industry standard architecture based on Intel microprocessor? If you answer yes to either of these questions then please read on.

Intel and SUN have been working closely together to optimize the Solaris operating system on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor. Most of you probably know the Xeon 5500 better by its product codename Nehalem. The Xeon 5500 is the the product that fits into 2 socket platforms.

SUN have just published a very compelling quick reference guidethat will assist both Developers and System Administrators looking to optimize Solaris solutions on Xeon based processors. The guide talks about the work that Intel and SUN are doing together, technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris OS to optimize the capabilities of the Xeon.

I have just finished reading this and it is a very compelling paper covering topics such as

- How Solaris takes advantage of Intel Turbo Boost Technology to use available power headroom to deliver higher performance based on workload demand

- How Solaris can take advantage of new Intel Quickpath Interconnect (better known as QPI) and other innovations in the OS to reduce memory latency

- How Solaris performance counters help to better manage workloads

- How Solaris takes advantage of many of the power efficiency capabilities in the processor. Things like Power Aware Dispatched in Solaris enable the processor to stay longer in idle states. In non tech talk this saves power.

Solaris has been a tried and tested operating system for along time for companies running their most business critical workloads. This paper talks about the combination of Solaris and Xeon to deliver improved reliability and availability for these critical workloads. Detail information on predictive self healing, fault management, leveraging Intel Machine Check Architecture and more all included in this paper.

Probably my favourite section is around the developer tools optimizations and the different tools available for developers that want to run and optimize their applications on Solaris and Xeon.

Ok, I'll stop waxing lyrical now. This is a very compelling paper and it does certainly construe that Solaris and Xeon 5500 could be the perfect combination for your Solaris solution. What do you think?

I was thinking about what to write in my next blog and what I could share beyond what I have written previously about Intel Vs RISC in terms of TCO, performance and the customers that are choosing to move.

Luckily I didn't have to think too long on a Friday morning as a a topic came to mind instantly. There are numerous articles flying around this morning that picked up on the Oracle comments yesterday about how SPARC based systems compare to Intel. Thanks for providing me with an appropriate topic.

So in case you missed it, there was a question and answer session with Larry Ellison. When asked about SPARC, this was the reply "SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not a green issue, its an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines"

1) SPARC more energy efficient than Intel?  Seriously, in what parallel universe does that exists?

SUN continues to use watts per thread as measure of energy efficiency. The recognized industry standard benchmark for measuring energy efficiency is SPECpowerand I don't see any SPARC based results in the 91 results published. The absence of a result certainly says something very clear to me - no story.

These UltraSPARCT2+ systems get loaded with a lot of memory to deliver the their results, so when you look at overall system power (what people care about) they are not as energy efficient as Intel based systems.

SPECpower is effectively based of SPECJbb-2005 so another way of loking at this is to look at the SPECJbb-2005 results for a 4 socket UltraSPARcT2+ system and a Xeon 7400 system. The 4s UltraSPARCT2+ delivers 693k BOPs while Xeon 7400 is 532kBOPs. So you conclude that SPARC is better than Xeon?. That would be the wrong conclusion

UltraSPARCT2+ system would consume 1525 watts Vs Xeon 7400 at 816 watts. If you look at BOPs per watt (another way of looking at energy efficiency and performance) then you would see that Xeon 7400 is 43% more energy efficient. Doing a similar comparison with Xeon 5400 (I haven't even talked about our latest Xeon 5500, Nehalem) would be up to 77% more efficient than UltraSPARCT2+.

And lastly before I forget to mention the 4s UltraSPARCT2+ had 128GB memory and costs over $150,000for the system, while Xeon 7400 based system had 64GB memory and costs around $32,000.

2) SPARC deliver same performance on a per socket basis?

2S Xeon 5500 has performance leadership over 2S UltaSPARCT2+ across a wide range of benchmarks. Up to 70% more performance and up to 60% lower system cost. 4S Xeon 7400 has price/performance leadership over 4S UltraSPARCT2+, UltraSPARCT2+ results achieved with system loaded with lots of memory that drives the cost up to 3-4Xthat of Xeon 7400 system

3) SPARC machine are less expensive to run?. I can't for the life of me work this one out!.

Hardware systems based on Intel have leading price/performance (read cheaper), lower energy needs (so electrivity bill lower) and any software product with a license per core strcuture is less expensive on Xeon system than an 8 core UltraSPARcT2+ (which also has higher multipler per core)

That's all for now folks. I just wanted to share some data on why I know that SPARC machines are much MORE expensive to run than Intel machines

Two weeks ago, I flew to Mexico City to present on virtualization technologies to both government agencies and private industry.  In both cases their issues were the same.  They are trying to do more with less.  In these times of global economic uncertainty, businesses are being challenged to reduce spending, while still improving infrastructure to keep up with business demand.  This is true, especially in the US, where in one case the construction of a 300 million dollar data center was put on hold and instead IT was task to reduce their server footprint in an at-capacity data center. The new focuses . . . find ways to reduce overall power and cooling costs.  Almost every company is looking at virtualization as one key component of the equation to finding solutions to these data center problems.

The combination of a managed virtualization solution coupled with an efficient Intel processor based server is one highly effective means to solve the “do more with less” mandate.  Let’s start by talking about the new Xeon 5500 processor that was just unveiled last Monday.  You have a need to reduce power and consolidate servers?  A Xeon 5500 based server can effectively replace eight to nine older single-core servers. 9x performance improvements have been seen using things like Turbo Boost.  The processor idle power drops to only 10 watts, enabling a 50% reduction in system idle power compared to our previous generation chip.  Everything I’m seeing on this is that you can recoup your capital investment in around 8 to 9 months from reduced maintenance, power use, software licensing, and cooling costs. Your energy savings alone can be as high as a 90% reduction!  That’s big! 

Check out more details on the launch of the new Xeon 5500 processor with Intel’s press release.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090330corp_sm.htm?iid=pr1_releasepri_20090330smr#story

Second, let’s talk about Intel’s power management embedded in the chipset.  This component is the key to rapidly recouping power costs and maximizing your server consolidation efforts.  For a good introduction to Intel’s power management system for server power capping in the data center, take a look at Jackson He’s blog “Datacenter Dynamic Power Management – Intelligent Power Management on Intel Xeon® 5500”.

http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/2009/03/31/datacenter-dynamic-power-management-intelligent-power-management-on-intel-xeon-5500

Lastly, virtualization management software drives ROI but the challenge in the management of large virtual infrastructures is that there are no clear boundaries in terms of network, storage and datacenter management teams.  This needs to be defined as well as an emphasis on a holistic management approach or a “Service Management” approach.  We have to get beyond just monitoring the uptime or resource usage levels of virtual machines (VM) and physical hosts. Along with Intel’s announcement of our latest Xeon 5500, there have also been a number of new product announcements in the past two months.  From VMworld Europe 2009, we heard about vSphere 4.0 and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and at ManageFusion Symantec touting improved virtualization functionality and management with CMS/SMS 7.0 integrating Intel’s vPro functionality.

Are the current products providing a holistic management approach with virtualization?

Is it the right strategy to integrate power management with virtualization management?

I’ve got my opinion on this, what’s yours?

Mark

Virtualization usage models continue to evolve and so does Intel technologies that support it.

Consolidation is the foundation usage model of virtualization. This we term the basic virtualization 1.0 usage model. Workload consolidation with virtualization within a physical server helps IT realize cost savings and also cost avoidance. Intel VT technologies, power efficient performance of Xeon 5400 and Xeon 7400, and reliability capabilities are essentially the building blocks for consolidation.

Emerging usage models or virtualization 2.0 go beyond more than cost savings and cost avoidance. They target data center efficiency and business continuity. Virtualization 2.0 hence is a step after 1.0. Once workloads are consolidated the key challenge for IT is to utilize the consolidated resources in the data center in the most efficient manner and making sure that one consolidated workload does not impact the others running on the same platform. Essentially, how can IT move the workload from one system to another is a resource pool (that now spans more than a single physical server) for efficient use of their data center resources to manage application SLAs and manage datacenter power and performance resources; and how can IT ensure business continues to run with better reliability and availability. VM mobility is a corner stone of virtualization 2.0 usage models such as load balancing and virtualization high availability. Intel technologies have also evolved to meet the requirements of these usage models. Some of the important ones are Intel VT FlexMigration and virtualization technologies for I/O (that I have blogged about in the past). Intel VT FlexMigration for instance provides investment protection to IT by allowing resource pooling of multiple generations of Intel Xeon based servers. This way IT does not have to break a resource pool to get the benefit of new energy efficient hardware when they refresh. This allows IT to constantly also refresh without impacting their datacenter architecture, as new processors typically deliver better energy efficient performance than previous generation and newer capabilities to meet the customer demands in this digital age.

It is also note worthy that customers buy solutions and not just hardware or software. So it is important that these solutions be efficiently enabled with the ecosystem for customers to take advantage of the benefits. In this video clip, learn from Steve (VMware CTO) and Doug (VP, Intel, Software Solutions Group), how Intel and VMware, are working together to deliver solutions that meet IT demands.

More online resources to usage models with virtualization and Intel technologies that enable these usage models efficiently:

Part1 virtualization usage models

Part2 virtualization usage models

Part3 Intel role in evolving usage models