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• Sun displayed its 2U dual core Opteron machines. Dual core support will skyrocket the virtualization industry by doubling your server density, and then providing the potential to cut your cost by more than half. AMD Opteron dual core chips are already available from several vendors such as Sun, HP or IBM, while the Intel Xeon dual core parts are also ready to go now. Many attendees proclaimed they already run AMD dual cores on ESX 2.52. Fujitsu Siemens told us they have a blade server ready designed to allow the connection of two blades to build a quad CPU server (with eight cores) by simply wiring them together using HyperTransport. This company is also working on a way to hook up four of these blades to one another, for the purpose of creating a 16-core server. That gives you the ability to have two 16-core and one eight-core server in their 7U blade center. This all will probably be at a cost that will make servers like today's IBM x400 series look like pricy mainframes. Even HP jumped on the Opteron dual core bandwagon due to the lack of Intel dual core server chips. The only products we saw were Intel dual core machines from Dell, which were based on the Pentium D.

• There are several key issues that Intel wants to address with its 2006 Bensley platform, including reliability, availability and serviceability - although performance is really the first thing to really worry about and, yes, it is obviously going to increase, too. The second item is called efficiency and utilization. Well, some efficiency improvements were overdue and utilization mainly refers to the virtualization technology that Intel is going to introduce with the release of its 65- nm processors. Intel calls it VT, while the AMD counterpart is called Pacifica for the time being. Both allow for installing a so-called Hypervisor, which is a core that extends the system by adding multiple system partitions. In the desktop, you could install Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Media Center Edition, and have both run at the same time. The first would allow you to do office work while the second acts as media center in your living room - with only one (dual/multi core) computer. In server environments, virtualized machines could be used to simplify clustering, to assign a 'new server' to a software development team within minutes, to move software-virtualized solutions (VMWare) one level down to hardware or simply to reduce the number of actual machines in use at a given time. There will be many potential applications for virtualization technology that most of us haven't even considered. Just think about a TV provider that would like to have people access its network while getting rid of set-top boxes: Just install your pay TV OS... RAS - reliability, availability and serviceability is the third item on the list. In 2006, Intel wants to add support for software RAID 6 to its platforms. In contrast to RAID 5, RAID 6 runs double redundancy to keep a hard drive array workable even if two drives should fail. Manageability finally is going to introduce iAMT (Active Management Technology) features into the server space.

• Figure 11: AMD/Intel next-generation server cores (images Copyright 2006 AMD for Opteron chip views and logo, 2005 Intel Corporation for Xeon chip views) Linux achieved yet another major milestone in 2006 in the server virtualization (SV) market space, with a few prominent (though entirely separate) software initiatives. Business customer demands for increases in virtualized performance have prompted both hardware vendors and software developers to make a collaborative effort to tightly integrate hardware-level virtualization features and software application interfaces. Both AMD and Intel provide in-kernel virtualization schemes that, when coupled with a well-designed application architecture, can deliver bare-metal performance. EMC's VMware product line encompasses a wide variety of virtualization solutions, from the home desktop to the enterprise server. VMware has already established street credibility in the SV marketplace as a turnkey solutions provider catering to tighter Linux-Windows integration and interoperability. EMC recently went to great lengths to market the latest revolution of workstation and server applications, and even openly released free evaluation copies for both Windows and Linux platforms. This small token of generosity is an excellent opportunity for proponents of OSS to push Linux into predominantly Windows-based environments, or wherever Linux appears to promise a better return on hardware investment or licensing costs. Figure 12: Xen, OpenVZ, VMware icons Perhaps even more momentous than the EMC movement are the Xen and OpenVZ SV OSS initiatives, both of which boast tighter integration between the Linux platform and hardware-based virtualization features found in the latest AMD and Intel server offerings. Two prominent Linux distributors, Red Hat and Novell (SUSE), mutually announced their plans to adopt Xen SV software into their forthcoming mainstream enterprise distributions, due out later this year. Xen clearly has established an advantageous position: as a pervasive part of the mainstream product lines of both companies, Xen can quickly gain exposure to their combined subscriber bases. SWsoft's OpenVZ SV software also provides an OSS solution for the Linux platform, and the company is urging its integration directly into the mainstream Linux kernel. One of the competitive advantages that OpenVZ has over similar projects, is that OpenVZ is derived from a well-regarded commercial application with a proven track history made by the same publisher, called Virtuozzo. Whether or not OpenVZ takes foothold as a mainstream component remains to be seen, but the simple fact that Linux has a huge spotlight in the SV marketplace plays a pivotal role in shaping its future for all parties involved. Microsoft also plays a role in the virtualization market, and promises to deliver its upcoming Vista platform with integrated virtualization capability. Currently, support for Red Hat and Novell distributions is available in its Virtual Server 2005 (Release 2) product line, and it works for customers that use VS 2005 alongside Linux installations. By the same token, Microsoft's offering faces its biggest threat from VMware, which installs and runs on both Linux and Windows servers.