VMworld Briefing Note - VirtenSys
Our first briefing and later our first demo at VMworld was with VirtenSys. They are one of three players in the I/O Virtualization (IOV) space that we follow closely at Storage Switzerland. What makes IOV unique is how each of the three primary competitors approach this potential market. As we discussed in “What is I/O Virtualization” the value of IOV is to abstract I/O from the physical server. This can either be to allow multiple virtual machines or even physical servers to share the same Ethernet, Fibre Channel or other interface card or to be able to dynamically allocate more cards to a server that is becoming I/O constrained.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Where each of the three IOV companies tend to differ is in how they connect the physical servers to their respective I/O gateways and what type of cards can be placed in those gateways. From the connectivity out of the server perspective VirtenSys uses a PCIe expansion card to extend the PCIe bus to their I/O gateway. The physical server simply thinks it has extra I/O slots added to it. You can and probably will install two of these cards for redundancy. If one card fails the physical server just acts as if a PCIe slot went bad and they all have the logic to handle that condition. As a result redundancy is relatively straight forward.
The other area of differentiation is in the type of cards that are used. VirtenSys can you off the shelf I/O cards. The don’t require any special type of cards. While some software customization has to be done at the gateway to support the specific card, essentially “teaching” it to be shared, VirtenSys can add almost any card to the supported list in relative short order, especially if it is of the same type. For example once they have one 10GbE card supported the work to support others is straight forward. The impact of the VirtenSys architecture is that they have relatively inexpensive but high speed connectivity to their gateway and potentially a wide range of supported cards at their gateway.
Their demonstration on the VMworld show floor featured their new VIO-4004 I/O Gateway that is an Ethernet only I/O virtualization appliance. In that gateway they have four Intel Ethernet Server Adapter X520 being virtualized across six hosts. They were able to show bandwidth rate per server previously though unattainable and were able to dynamically reallocate bandwidth as needed.
VirtenSys was also able to show true stateless server capabilities without having to use customized server hardware, thanks to their native PCIe capabilities. They showed a server running windows and with a couple of clicks within the VirtenSys Management GUI were able to reboot that server and have it running Linux in a matter of seconds. Stateless computing delivers the ultimate in abstraction and is something that we expect to see a growing trend toward. VirtenSys may have an early leader in this category.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
VMworld Briefing Note
Storage Switzerland is at VMworld in force again this year and as in years past we will be doing our best to bring you continuous updates from the event. These reports are quick summaries of our meetings at the show; look for more detailed analysis on our blogs on Network Computing.
