VMWARE AND INTEL | Solution Brief
High-Performance, Always-On IT for Small and Mid-size Businesses
VMware vSphere™ 4.1 and Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series-based Servers
Intel and VMware deliver enterprise-class IT to small and mid-size businesses, with optimized virtualization solutions that are powerful, simple, and affordable. Small and mid-size businesses rely on their IT infrastructure just as much as larger businesses, and face many of the same challenges. They need to deliver always-on service and strong security, to keep the business operating safely and efficiently. They also need to establish a flexible foundation that lets them add capacity and new functionality quickly as the business grows and requirements change. However, as IT has become increasingly complex, IT infrastructures have become prohibitively rigid, brittle and costly. Many companies now spend a significant amount of their IT budgets simply maintaining the status-quo. Intel and VMware offer powerful, cost-effective and flexible virtualization solutions that can help businesses reduce these costs, simplify and grow their infrastructure, and devote a larger percentage of their IT budget to innovative projects that deliver higher value to the business.
The Foundation of Virtualization Solution Brief | VMWARE AND INTEL
• Ensure always-on IT and cost-effective data protection with highly reliable servers and simple, fully-automated health monitoring, failover, and disaster recovery. With VMware vMotion™ for live migration, you can eliminate even planned downtime by moving workloads to different servers for hardware maintenance. • Improve application quality by testing new applications, upgrades and patches in pre-production virtual machine “sandbox” staging environments. You can clone your production environment almost instantly to ensure realistic testing so you can avoid software problems that might otherwise cause critical business applications to fail. • Strengthen security by establishing secure configuration templates for your virtual machines and by taking advantage of automated patch management and stateful security policies for migrated workloads. You can also implement encryption without undue performance loss, so you can protect your data and communications more effectively.
• Servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series provide Improve Application Performance a uniquely powerful and cost-effective foundation for virtualizing The Intel Xeon processor 5600 series includes next-generation Intel® infrastructure to dramatically improve IT capability, flexibility and Virtualization Technology◊ (Intel® VT), which accelerates application efficiency. With industry-leading virtualization performance and performance by providing comprehensive hardware assists for core up to 15 times1 the capacity of servers that were available just a few virtualization functions. In combination with software optimization years ago, they allow small and mid-size businesses to consolidate in VMware vSphere, this reduces virtualization overhead to as low all their workloads onto a small number of systems to drive down as 2 percent (typically 2-10 percent),3 so nearly the full power of costs and simplify growth. the platform is unleashed to ensure fast application performance • VMware helps businesses maximize the value of these powerful in virtual machines. Virtualization performance is increased by up servers, by optimizing utilization, simplifying management, to 3.5x compared with earlier multicore Intel Xeon processors and and protecting systems, data and applications more effectively. roundtrip virtualization latencies are reduced by up to 2x.4 As you VMware vSphere™ Hypervisor is a free solution that makes it consolidate applications from older servers, you can expect to easy to get started with enterprise-class virtualization, enabling see significant improvements in application throughput and companies to consolidate multiple virtual machines on a single response times. high-performance server. Designed for IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, VMware vSphere Essentials kits are all-in- Magnify Your Cost Savings through one solutions that combine virtualization for up to three physical Higher Consolidation Ratios servers (up to two processors each) with centralized manage- ment capabilities. For mid-size businesses, VMware offers four VMware vSphere running on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series-based main vSphere editions that provide greater scalability, along with servers provides the scalable capacity to consolidate large numbers advanced features for creating highly responsive private of applications and heavy workloads on each server, so you can cloud infrastructures. simplify your computing environment and dramatically reduce your capital and operating costs. With VMware VSphere™ 4.1 and Intel Xeon processor 5600 series-based servers, you can: • Up to 12 high-performance cores per two-socket server deliver exceptional performance for multiple virtual machines running • Reduce IT costs by consolidating all your applications and simultaneously. Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology† doubles workloads onto a small number of Intel Xeon processor 5600 the number of execution threads per core to further increase series-based servers. The savings can be dramatic and can increase parallelism and throughput. utilization from 5-15 percent to as much as 60-80 percent.2 VMWARE AND INTEL | Solution Brief
• Intel® Turbo Boost Technology§ delivers higher performance on demand, by increasing frequencies for peak workloads. • Intel® QuickPath Technology, an integrated memory controller, and 12 MB of cache help to eliminate potential memory and I/O bottlenecks that might otherwise slow virtualized performance as your workloads grow. With these resources, you can consolidate up to 15 or more older servers based on single-core processors to dramatically reduce capital costs as well as space and power requirements. VMware extends these advantages, by letting you increase utilization to as much as 60-80 percent. It also provides industry-leading support for dynamic resource allocation, memory compression, and memory over-commit, all of which can help you run more virtual machines per server with consistent and highly reliable performance.
The Intel Xeon processor 5600 series adds additional security The latest version of vSphere improves all of these functions by functionality that can help you protect your systems, migrating virtual machines up to five times faster2 and enabling software and business assets more effectively. up to eight simultaneous vMotion events. It also provides deeper diagnostics and health checking, enhanced back-up and restore capabilities and improved reporting for key storage performance Implement Simple, Cost-Effective Solutions statistics. With this functionality, you can monitor, control and for High Availability restore your systems and software more quickly and effectively to further improve service levels. VMware Enhanced vMotion and Intel® Virtualization Technology FlexMigration provide a proven live migration solution for moving Improve Security to Protect Your Business workloads without downtime among current and future Intel Xeon processor-based servers. This capability provides a solid and VMware vSphere makes it easy to establish and maintain secure affordable foundation for a complete array of high-availability configuration standards. It also provides automated patch and disaster-recovery solutions. management for physical hosts and virtual machines, and enables businesses to test software patches and upgrades in realistic • VMware High Availability monitors and restarts virtual machines environments before deploying them to production systems. The on servers that have spare capacity. This cost-effective, automated Intel Xeon processor 5600 series adds additional security functional- solution minimizes downtime and IT service disruption, while ity that can help you protect your systems, software and business eliminating the need for dedicated stand-by hardware. assets more effectively. • VMware Fault Tolerance takes high availability to the next level, • Intel® AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) Technology by providing fully-mirrored operation with continuous availability improves CPU performance for encryption by as much as 52 to eliminate even the smallest IT service disruption. It provides percent for secure Internet transactions5 and for encrypting zero down-time, zero data-loss protection without the cost or databases and other files. It can allow you to protect critical data complexity of alternative solutions.2 and communications more effectively throughout your business, • VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager allows you to auto- without compromising performance. mate failover for all your systems and workloads. It is not only far • With appropriate software support (currently in development simpler and more cost effective than traditional disaster-recovery by VMware), Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) solutions, but also more reliable, since it eliminates error-prone ensures that physical servers and virtual machines launch only manual processes and is easily tested without disrupting your into known good states, to help protect them from rootkits and production environment. other emerging malware. Deploying servers that support this technology today will provide you with a hardware foundation for fundamentally improving security as software solutions emerge. Solution Brief | VMWARE AND INTEL
Decrease Your Costs even Further with Establish an Evolutionary Path to the Cloud Intelligent Performance VMware and Intel are strongly invested in delivering advanced Virtualizing and consolidating your systems and applications is one cloud computing functionality to small and mid-size businesses of the most effective ways to simplify your computing environ- today, while also helping them establish an interoperable ment, reduce your hardware costs, and drive down your space, foundation for integrating with current and future public clouds. power and management requirements. VMware vSphere takes Both companies are working closely with each other, with advantage of Intel® Intelligent Power Technology∂ to further reduce industry leaders, and with major service and hosting providers power consumption at the system level, by consolidating workloads to make cloud computing more powerful, efficient, secure and onto as few cores as possible. For example, when workloads are interoperable. Intel Xeon processor-based servers provide a light, vSphere can automatically increase the frequency of one or high-performing, scalable, energy-efficient hardware platform more cores by as much as 400 MHz, shift more workloads onto the for public and private cloud infrastructures. The vSphere plat- higher performing cores, and put idle cores into low-power sleep form helps to ensure broad software compatibility with diverse states. VMware® Distributed Power Management (DPM) provides cloud solutions, through new storage APIs and the new vCloud similar control at a higher level by automatically redistributing virtual application programming interface (API). machines onto a smaller number of servers when workloads are You can take advantage of this industry-leading virtualization light and shutting down the unneeded systems. You’ll benefit from platform today to deploy advanced cloud computing functionality a greener computing environment and lower utility bills. for your business. It will help you deliver better and more reliable service, while improving productivity and reducing costs. It will also provide you with an interoperable foundation that will keep your options open as cloud computing models evolve.
To learn how your company can take advantage of VMware virtualization running on Intel Xeon processor-based servers to improve performance and reduce costs, visit The Foundation of Virtualization www.vmwareintelalliance.com
◊ Intel® Virtualization Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, BIOS, virtual machine monitor (VMM) and, for some uses, certain platform software enabled for it. Functionality, performance or other benefits will vary depending on hardware and software configurations and may require a BIOS update. Software applications may not be compatible with all operating systems. Please check with your application vendor. † Hyper-Threading Technology requires a computer system with an Intel processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology and an HT Technology enabled chipset, BIOS and operating system. Performance will vary depending on the specific hardware and software you use. See http://www.intel.com/info/hyperthreading/ for more information including details on which processors support HT Technology. §Intel® Turbo Boost Technology requires a platform with a processor with Intel Turbo Boost Technology capability. Intel Turbo Boost Technology performance varies depending on hardware, software and overall system configuration. Check with your platform manufacturer on whether your system delivers Intel Turbo Boost Technology. For more information, see http://www.intel.com/technology/turboboost. ∂Intel® Intelligent Power Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, chipset, BIOS and for some features, an operating system enabled for it. Functionality or other benefits may vary depending on hardware implementation and may require a BIOS and/or operating system update. Please check with your system vendor for details. § Intel® Turbo Boost Technology requires a platform with a processor with Intel Turbo Boost Technology capability. Intel Turbo Boost Technology performance varies depending on hardware, software and overall system configuration. Check with your platform manufacturer on whether your system delivers Intel Turbo Boost Technology. For more information, see http://www.intel.com/technology/turboboost. ∂ Intel® Intelligent Power Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, chipset, BIOS and for some features, an operating system enabled for it. Functionality or other benefits may vary depending on hardware implementation and may require a BIOS and/or operating system update. Please check with your system vendor for details. 1 Source: Intel measurements as of February 2010. Performance comparison using server side java bops (business operations per second). Results have been estimated based on internal Intel analysis and are provided for informational purposes only. 2 Source: VMware vSphere 4.1 Product Datasheet 2010, http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Enterprise-DataSheet-DS-EN.pdf. 3 Source: VMware Capacity Planner assessments. 4 Performance results on VMmark benchmark. Intel® Xeon® processor X5470 data based on published results for HP Proliant* ML370 G5 server platform with Intel® Xeon® processors X5470 3.33 GHz, 2x6 MB L2 cache, 1333 MHz FSB, 48 GB memory, VMware ESX* V3.5.0 Update 3, published at 9.15@ 26 tiles, vs. Intel reference platform using two Intel Xeon processors X5680 (12M cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI), 96 GB memory (12x 8 GB DDR3-800 Reg ECC DIMMs), VMware ESX* V4.0 Update 1. Performance measured at 32.25@ 26 tiles. Roundtrip latency for the different CPU generations based on internal Intel CPU architectural assessments for Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series (Nehalem) relative to Intel® Xeon® processor 5400 series (Penryn). 5 Source: Internal Intel measurements using a web banking workload running PHP and Windows Server 2008 R2, comparing number of banking sessions (users) for an Intel® Xeon® processor X5680 (3.33 GHz) vs. an Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 (2.93 GHz). Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit www.intel.com/performance/resources/limits.htm