Virtualization's Promise And Problems
Posted by
Charles Babcock
May 16, 2008
The virtual I/O appliance approach also reduces network cabling in the data center and lets IT administrators buy smaller, more energy-efficient servers that have fewer networking ports and bulky HBAs and NICs.
Virtualizing I/O makes data centers more efficient and balances I/O for virtual machine workloads, says Ray Lane, former president of Oracle and an investor in Xsigo. "Inflexible architectures contribute to the low resource utilization and waste scarce power, space, and cooling resources," Lane says.Another way of virtualizing I/O is done in the standard HBA or NIC, without resorting to an add-on appliance. Industry group PCI-SIG came up with the SR-IOV standard, which virtualizes high-speed, 10-Gbps Ethernet for future NICs and HBAs.
A non-SR-IOV network interface card would be allocated to a virtual machine or set of VMs on a server and represent a fixed resource of static capacity, say 1 Gbps. Neterion's SR-IOV-enabled X3100 Series of adapters can generate up to 16 useable channels and dynamically allocate them to the VMs based on need. That capability can even guarantee the full 10-Gbps capacity of the NIC to one virtual machine, if its service-level agreements give it priority, rather than having a limited, fixed amount of capacity specified.
"For a big database backup, 1 Gbps of capacity is no longer enough," says Neterion CEO Dave Zabrowski. "We're trying to consolidate needed capacity into a single pipe." Under most scenarios, however, the 16 channels would be serving multiple VMs simultaneously.
The driver for Neterion's 10-Gbps Xframe adapters is included in VMware's ESX hypervisor, allowing it to allocate traffic between ESX-generated VMs and the Neterion card. The Neterion adapters are built for Fujitsu Computer Products of America, HP, IBM, and Sun servers.
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