Virtual Infrastructure Summit At VMWorld 2005

What About Multi Core CPUs?

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.