Will multiplying processors be problematic for virtualization?

The industry appears split on whether the increasing number of multiple cores of microprocessors will unduly affect virtualization.
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With the explosion in multiple cores under Intel and AMD, key software in the enterprise is experiencing greater difficulty in terms of catching up with the relentless doubling every two years of processors per microprocessor chip, stated Gartner in a recent report.

Its author, Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, maintained that this problem affects operating systems, middleware, virtualization tools and applications. And he particularly emphasized the impact on virtualization.

"Microsoft Hyper-V in the latest version will only support 24 processors and the latest VMWare only supports 32. Those are the facts."

Furthermore, Claunch continued, it is possible that some machines might allow you to turn off some of the processors so that they become invisible to the hypervisor or OS.

"But then you have just paid for hardware that is turned off and useless. Why buy a four socket server and turn off two sockets to run virtualization if this gives you exactly the same capability as a much cheaper two socket machine."

The Gartner analyst offered the following scenario. Currently, a 32 socket server, with eight core chips split between the two sockets, contains in total 256 processors. In two years with 16 processors in each server socket, the machine would then have 512 processors. Four years from now, with 32 processors per socket shipping, that machine would host 1,024 processors

"Looking at the specifications for these software products, it is clear that many will be challenged to support the hardware configurations possible today and those that will be accelerating in the future. The impact is akin to putting a Ferrari engine in a go-cart; the power may be there, but design mismatches severely limit the ability to exploit it."

However, Scott Drummonds, group manager, technical marketing at VMware, asserted that Claunch "is half right" in the sense that today's commonly used enterprise applications such as Microsoft's Exchange Server, Sequel Server and Sharepoint can only leverage four cores.

"When you go to eight processors, sixteen, the performance of Exchange [for instance] does not increase. It can't service more work to its users."

Two exceptions, he said, are Oracle which has managed to make allowances for multiple cores in the design of its database applications, and VMware itself.

"We have not seen any limitations in scalability in our base product, ESX server. We can scale up to all of the cores that are available on today's servers," stated Drummonds.

He maintained that VMware ESX server and Virtualization Infrastructure can work around the limitations in the enterprise applications, gain more out of the multiple cores "and fix that gap."

Currently, VMware software can create virtual machines that will each support up to four CPUs, Drummonds noted.

"We are limited by the number of processors, but there aren't architectural limitations in [our] software that exist in applications."

Meanwhile, Bill Moran, research director at Ptak Noel & Associates, suggested that VMware with its origins in the university research software labs, might have an easier time accommodating multiple cores, threads and processors than either Microsoft or the developers of Linux applications.

He remarked a system deteriorates as the gap between the applications and the number of processors expands.

"As I say it is fixable. But it is troublesome, it is expensive and it is hard. For UNIX it took a number of years to actually correct some of that [and] the same thing with the mainframe."

One option around that issue is hardware partitioning, Moran continued. More unrealistic, he added, is the advice given by the Gartner report that enterprise customers keep purchasing the latest systems with the largest number of cores, threads and processors coupled with the applications that fit them as close as possible, in addition to the older hardware for certain situations.

"As a practical man, you don't keep doubling things forever. Give me a break. You are not going to have 10,000 processors in the entire system."

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BY Paul Weinberg
Source：eChannelLine

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