Guess what folks. It’s not an Intel world after all. AMD, the competitor that comes closest to Intel’s dominance of the CPU market, is about to release new versions of their processors. We all know that when it comes to megahertz speeds, both companies’ processors are operating at around the same numbers. So, how does each company plan on getting a leg up on its competition? The strategy now seems to be about raising the amount of cores per CPU, which means changing the architecture of the processor itself. As Intel and AMD continue to push each other with new processor enhancements and features, we have to take stock of the effects that architecture changes have on virtualization environments. In a VMware virtual infrastructure configure with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster service, CPU feature incompatibility can create some serious challenges. VMware’s VMotion, the underlying technology of the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), is very dependent on CPU features and architectures. Therefore, without CPU architecture compatibility, VMotion and DRS may not work.
Fortunately, developers are starting to catch on to these issues. VMware has introduced a feature called Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC), which allows customers to prevent some of the CPU incompatibility issues by allowing the configuration of CPU baselines based on their architecture and model. EVC will mask features that are not compatible with older processors in order to allow the VMotion/DRS migrations without any problems. Intel has also developed a new feature called FlexMigration, and AMD has worked on a similar feature called AMD-V Extended Migration. Those features allow VMware’s EVC to mask features from newer processors.
In the demonstration below you’ll see Ron Mayers, a product marketing manager at AMD migrate virtual machines from a new server equipped with AMD Opteron Istanbul 6 Core processors to two other servers with AMD Opteron Barcelona 4 Core processors and AMD Opteron Shanghai. All three servers are running ESX Server 3.5. Get a glimpse of how ESX Servers 3.5 are already compatible with a high amounts of cores per CPU.
AMD Istanbul Live Migration Demo
