Customer Scenario
A successful virtualization project is defined by higher performance and hardware utilization, lower costs, and improved IT flexibility. With Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology, IT teams can virtualize applications running either 32-bit or 64-bit operating environments on fewer machines. However, the success of any virtualization project can be enhanced or diminished by the capabilities of the hardware platform. To fully realize the benefits of virtualization—improved application reliability, better business agility, and data center cost reductions—organizations need to focus as much on choosing a reliable, flexible, and robust hardware platform as they do on choosing their virtualization software.
Intel + Microsoft Solution
When virtualizing workloads, begin by considering the workload in isolation, ensuring that:
Next, consider the requirement of the workload in the context of other workloads to determine how virtual machines should be placed on host servers. Then, determine resource allocation by evaluating what kind of physical requirements each workload requires and determine any additional input/output (I/O) needs.
With more virtual machines on each server, organizations will need additional network adapters to support more bandwidth, especially when employing the iSCSI protocol. Dual-port and quad-port Intel gigabit server adapters provide redundancy, in the event of a switch port failure, and additional I/O bandwidth. Intel servers that accommodate virtualization workload requirements:
Intel Xeon processor 7000 sequence is used for virtualization of resource-intensive applications with the highest level of availability.
Intel Xeon processor 5000 sequence provides leading price and performance per watt, which is an ideal solution for smaller IT virtualization projects.
Then determine a service level agreement (SLA) for each virtualized workload. The SLA will dictate the backup plan, the disaster recovery requirements, and how much tolerance the organization has to loss of service. Consider fault-tolerance requirements for physical and virtual servers.
With virtualization, security of both physical and virtual servers is critical. Reduce the potential for attack by:
Choosing Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 as the parent partition.
Deploying the physical server with a physical network card for physical server management and virtual machine networking.
Securing virtual machine configuration files and hard disk files using access control lists.
Keeping virtual machines patched, even offline.
Using virtual local area networks to segment virtual machines into their own virtual segments.
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V running on multi-core Intel Xeon processor-based servers provides a robust platform with the headroom and performance for server virtualization deployments.
With Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology running on Intel Xeon processor-based servers and Microsoft Application Virtualization running on client computers with Intel vPro™ technology, organizations can deploy virtualization solutions to help make business more robust, agile, and efficient.
Intel Xeon processor 7000 sequence is based on the Intel Core™ microarchitecture and offers leading scalable performance and best-in-class virtualization for server consolidation.
Intel Xeon processor 5000 sequence provides breakthrough performance, energy, efficiency, and reliability of Intel Xeon processor-based server systems, making them the ideal choice for infrastructure virtualization projects.
Intel Core 2 processor with vPro technology provides enhanced security, remote manageability, energy efficiency, and performance, allowing more time for strategic initiatives, not personal computer issues and downtime.
Intel Centrino® with vPro technology combines remote manageability, unique hardware-assisted and proactive security features, and breakthrough mobile performance for reliability that IT can trust, unleashed.
Intel vPro technology enables IT to take advantage of hardware-assisted security and manageability capabilities that enhance its ability to maintain, manage, and protect business.
Intel 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology with Intel Core microarchitecture delivers leadership performance and new levels of breakthrough energy efficiency.
Nehalem, the next-generation microarchitecture from Intel, represents the next step in processor energy efficiency, performance, and dynamic scalability. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of hafnium-based Intel 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology.
Intel VT-x baseline virtualization capability in the processor simplifies software and enables mixed 32-bit and 64-bit operating environments.
Intel FlexMigration provides investment protection and flexibility with live virtual machine migration between multiple generations of Intel Xeon processors.
Intel FlexPriority reduces virtualization interrupt overhead when deploying 32-bit guest operating systems.
Intel VT-d speeds data movement and eliminates much of the performance overhead by reducing the need for the virtual machine manager to manage I/O traffic.
Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) provides hardware assistance to supported network cards, providing a sorting function that is performed by dedicated hardware in Intel Server Adapters. All the virtual machine manager has to do is route the pre-sorted package groups to the appropriate guest operating systems, reducing I/O latency, and the processor has more cycles available for business applications.
PCI-SIG Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) extends Intel VT-d by enabling multiple direct communication channels for each I/O device.
Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V consolidates multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine so that users can efficiently run multiple operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and take advantage of the 64-bit operating environment.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables centralized management of physical and virtual IT infrastructures, increased server utilization, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms.
Microsoft Application Virtualization transforms applications into centrally managed virtual services that are never installed, do not conflict with other applications, and can be streamed on demand to desktops, servers, and laptops.
