AMD Demonstrates Live Migration on Opteron Platforms

Last month, I posted about my newfound love for virtualization, which came as a result of me actually taking the time to experiment and see all of what was possible from a home-user’s perspective. Given I run Linux as my primary OS, the draw has been there for a while, but it took just one final push of seeing a news story about it to make me pull the trigger.

Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve run my virtual machine through VMware Workstation pretty much everyday and haven’t had any major issues, so I’m still quite pleased. But while I have rather simple needs for virtualization, the story is far different in IT environments, where virtualization may be used to deploy desktops to company employees, or to allow testing of software throughout various OS configurations. All of it is very cool.

Cool might be taken to a new level with a video AMD just released though, which takes a look at VMware’s ESX software that allows you to actually perform a live migration with your virtual machines. On hand during the experiment were three near-identical AMD servers, Barcelona, Shanghai and Istanbul, with the VM residing on the first. With a few clicks, the host literally moved the virtual machine from Barcelona to Shanghai, and then from Shanghai to Istanbul, all with just a minor lag (the entire process took seconds, though). Impressive stuff.

Live Migration of virtual machines across physical servers is key to providing superior flexibility for managing today’s data centers. Additionally, AMD is highlighting its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which is available today as a beta and adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing. The new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor provides scalable performance for both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and has received support from all four global OEMs.