KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) Forum 2007

This is the first gathering of the community surrounding the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) project. The agenda is impressive with speakers from the development team, Intel, IBM, AMD, and others. The event is presented by Qumranet, the company supporting the KVM open source project.

As you may remember, I mentioned KVM in this article. Although Rails Machine’s virtualization infrastructure is based on Xen and CentOS, my local development environment is powered by Ubuntu and KVM (on a Thinkpad X60s and a home built Core 2 Quad).

So, why is KVM different? It leverages the hardware virtualization support in recent processors and uses the linux kernel as the hypervisor. This approach leads to a small implementation and easy integration. You can get up and running with KVM with simple package install commands on Ubuntu. It does not require an entire toolset that reimplements the functions of the operating system. For example, with KVM you can use the standard linux process tools like ‘ps’ and ‘top’ to manage virtual server processes.

And :

AMD Highlights Hardware Feature Key to Managing Virtualized IT Infrastructures

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“AMD-V™ Extended Migration”, embedded in multiple generations of AMD Opteron™ processors, enables customers to migrate live virtual sessions among servers without interruption or downtime

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SUNNYVALE, Calif -- August 30, 2007 --In a new white paper made available this week and at an industry address at KVM Forum 2007, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today disclosed details about “AMD-V™ Extended Migration”, a feature dating back to the First-Generation AMD Opteron™ processor that enables virtual machines to migrate between different versions of AMD processors. AMD has worked with VMware, the industry leading virtualization software provider, to refine this feature in order to enable a key functionality designed to help IT managers fully leverage the benefits of virtualized IT infrastructures. In addition, to further contribute to the industry discussion around how to implement and manage virtualization capabilities, AMD will be showcasing AMD-V Extended Migration using VMware Infrastrucutre at VMworld in San Francisco, September 11-13, 2007.

AMD-V Extended Migration provides the necessary support for virtualization software to mask the differences between CPU generations, facilitating the safe live migration of virtual machines between servers running different generations of AMD processors. This includes existing single-core and dual-core processors and all future AMD processor revisions, including the upcoming “Barcelona” Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, the first native x86 quad-core microprocessor.

“Customers running multiple generations of AMD servers will benefit from AMD-V Extended Migration because they can take advantage of previous hardware investments while migrating virtual machines between different AMD processor versions, including future versions, without downtime or limitation,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Division, AMD. “AMD-V Extended Migration was developed and implemented to help ensure AMD is supporting our ecosystem partners and customers. AMD’s commitment to furthering the evolution of virtualization technologies is evident in our upcoming Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, which we believe will help accelerate the adoption of virtualized infrastructures.”

AMD-V Extended Migration helps to protect a user's investment by providing flexible migration policies, which in turn broaden the benefits of a virtualized datacenter. For several generations, AMD processors have included specialized model-specific registers that supply information about the underlying CPU, the instructions it is running, and its configuration. By allowing the virtual machine to use only those features common across a pool of AMD Opteron processor-based servers of varying generations, AMD-V Extended Migration enables compatible virtualization software to more effectively leverage those servers.

Novell, Qumranet, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Virtual Iron, VMware and XenSource are among the leading virtualization software vendors with the capacity to take advantage of AMD-V Extended Migration.

Elsie Wahlig, AMD Fellow, is discussing this technology this week as a featured speaker at KVM Forum 2007, the first Kernel-based Virtual Machine forum, in Tucson, AZ. To foster further industry dialogue about implementing and managing virtualized environments, a new white paper titled “Live Virtual Machine Migration on AMD Processors” is now available for download at http://developers.amd.com. Additionally, to view clips from a recent AMD-hosted panel discussion that brought together leading virtualization software vendors for a discussion that included topics such as how to measure the success of a virtualization implementation, licensing scenarios and how to optimize workloads, please visit www.amd.com/virtualization/panel.

From the Sidney Herald:

Virtualization Could Pose A Real Threat To Microsoft

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Why is virtualisation important? Because it has the potential to make operating systems irrelevant. This is, as you might expect, of some interest to Microsoft, which has gone out of its way in recent months to put its own spin on virtualisation.

Operating systems are a vital component of modern computer systems. The operating system is the interface with the hardware - without them every application would have to include its own code for writing to and retrieving from disk drives, for printing, and for the many other housekeeping tasks we all take for granted.

The hullabaloo surrounding Microsoft's Vista, the messianic faith with which Macintosh addicts and Linux lovers defend their operating systems, the battle over the different flavours of Unix - all are testament to the power and the importance of the operating system. It is the operating system, more than anything, that defines a computer architecture.

Virtualisation shifts the paradigm. Like many terms in IT, it has no clearly defined meaning, but in its many forms it basically simulates hardware or an operating system, allowing a piece of software written for one environment to run on another.

The technology has been around for 40 years or more. IBM mainframes in the 1960s had an operating system called VM, which enabled them to host some of the other IBM operating systems as guests, and to switch them around as necessary.

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Yes indeed ....I remember it well......

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