The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with the new features including:

* Power management in the hypervisor
* Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) emulation domains for better scalability, performance and security
* Shadow pagetable improvements for the best HVM performance ever
* Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements
* Device passthrough enhancements
* CPUID feature levelling that allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models (within the same vendor brand – Intel or AMD)

Xen 3.3 provides virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 also supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, like Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT).

With Xen’s memory ballooning feature, the hypervisor can reallocate memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs) to guarantee performance and allow greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 also offers CPU portability to allow live migration of VMs across different CPUs, active power optimization to reduce server power consumption, and significant security enhancements.

Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems, said in a statement, “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems – and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.”

In addition to its growing development community, Xen hypervisor is the standard virtualization platform used by cloud computing providers like Amazon.com. It is also used in virtualization products from Citrix (XenServer), Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle (Oracle VM), Sun Microsystems (Sun xVM), and Virtual Iron, and is available as an embedded option in many x86 servers.

Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) ProLiant DL585 G5 with AMD’s Opteron processor is the top performer for 16-core systems on VMmark’s list. It is also used in HP’s 32 core, eight socket Proliant DL785 on VMmarks list, which achieved a score of 21.88@16 tiles or 96 virtual machines.

These results from AMD based systems aren’t surprising, since AMD Opteron’s virtualization assist technology has received high praise from VMware. One VMware engineer called AMD’s Nested Page Table (NPT) technology the answer to virtualizing large workloads.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a feature of AMD’s third-generation Opteron, includes NPT, is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications and allows fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.)

Intel Corp. has announced a technology similar to NPT, called Extended Page Tables (EPT), which will be available in its next-generation eight-core microarchitecture, code-named “Nehalem.” Nehalem is slated for production later this year

Today I had the opportunity to attend the IPIP event here in Columbus, Ohio. The meeting provided a great vendor-independent view of virtualization products that revolve around Intel technologies. Planning your virtualization hardware environment is critical to the decisions that will be made in your current and future virtualization implementations.

Between now and the end of the year, Intel is conducting ten more of these events throughout North America. The agenda of these events includes sessions in the following areas:

• Intel product roadmap
• Client virtualization strategies
• Consolidation efficiencies through virtualization
• Application virtualization strategies

One important advantage to attending the events is that you can have access to non-disclosure information about the processor product line, a key planning part of virtual environments. But the live events are only the tip of the iceberg. On the IPIP website, members can access case studies, presentations, videos and white papers anytime. Also, every page on the IPIP site has a popularity tag that content of all types can be viewed from the tags.

The best part of these resources is that they are free. Check out the Intel Premier IT Professional website and register for an event in your area.

Guests on the show included: Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix; Tom Bishop, Chief Technology Officer, of BMC Software; Dr. Tim Marsland, Sun Fellow, Chief Technology Officer, for the Software Organization at Sun Microsystems Inc.; and Brian Stevens, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Red Hat.

The glaring ommission in this lineup: VMware, Inc.

The panelists on CIO Talk Radio didn’t mention VMware by name, but did complain that some companies aren’t being open with their performance data, thus prohibiting the virtualization industry from publishing comparative performance data.

VMware’s licensing agreement for ESX allows users to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, and allows those users (and not unauthorized third parties) to publish or publicly disseminate the data provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.

Users that have published benchmark data, like Sr. Systems Engineer Mark Foster did on his blog, have had to unpublish results because of VMware’s stipulations.

VMware introduced its own free benchmarking tool, VMmark, last year for certain applications.

Meanwhile, the SPEC Virtualization Committee has been working to create standard benchmarks for VMs. The committee’s goals are to deliver a benchmark that will model server consolidation of commonly virtualized systems such as application servers, web servers and file servers; provide a means to compare server performance while running a number of VMs; and produce a benchmark designed to scale across a wide range of systems.

SPEC expects these benchmarks to be available by the end of this year, but the timeline is not set in stone, according to the website.

Sun’s Marsland said benchmarking progress has been slow because there isn’t an easy way to define a workload, and a large number of benchmarks are required.

“We are talking about a virtual computer, with lots of aspects that need to be benchmarked,” Marsland said. “Every component that gets virtualized needs to be benchmarked.”

Having an open, standardized way of benchmarking is expected to push virtualization further into the mainstream because it will eliminate false perceptions about performance, panelists said. For instance, “there is the thought that I/O intensive workloads can not be virtualized, and the absence of benchmarks prevents us from proving otherwise. It is important for us to have good benchmarks out there,” one panelist on the show said.

Though users look at benchmarks, this type of data is most useful to vendors and OEMs who can use the performance standards to improve the technology, and of course, market their products.

“More open scrutiny of performance results will help us to improve as an industry overall,” Bishop said. “There are ways to measure performance in non-virtual environments, and people are adapting those techniques to get the most out of their virtualized environments.”

In terms of application performance in virtual environments, the issues differ depending on the data center infrastructure. The network, the servers and the storage all affect performance, said Stevens of RedHat.

“The areas that have to progress are around I/O. Intel and AMD are improving around page tables, and we will see improvements around I/O adapters soon,” Stevens said.

Another problem with virtualization? There are support challenges. If an application running in a VM starts acting wacky, the application vendor may not support it, Crosby said.

Licensing and support in virtual environments has been a major gripe with Oracle, for example, which does not support running its applications with VMware.

“It is a reasonable concern…right now there is irrational market based control. Some folks are abstaining from supporting certain apps [in virtual envionments]. As customers demand support, things will hopefully get rational, by next year I hope,” Crosby said.

I just came back from the Intel Premier IT Professionals session in NYC, and while it was geared largely on the desktop space (apparently the Fall event will focus more on Servers), they spent some time covering virtualization and the new hardware coming out to support virtualization. The agenda covered Intel’s VT extensions that help improve system virtualization performance, and is such a key component of Virtual Iron’s and other Xen-based products. Without this (or AMD’s equivalent), there could be no way of making Microsoft operating systems run on Xen hypervisors. Intel also covered my grrr-item of the year – Windows Vista’s virtualization-friendly license that is friendly only for the Enterprise Edition, but I’ll grrr on that elsewhere. My favorite item of this year’s new hardware – Turbo Memory.

For those unfamiliar with Turbo Memory, it’s best described as this – picture a flash (NAND) drive that sits between your regular hard drive(s) and your CPU/Motherboard/RAM. There it acts as a cache for frequently used data (kind of like a CPU’s cache) and helps offload read/write to your hard disks, thereboy mitigating one of the last real bottlenecks in the architecture of modern PC-based systems. From my understanding, TM is tied to Vista’s ReadyDrive system for full functionality, but that will only last for so long before the concept moves into competitive production and other vendors figure out how to detach the TM concept from Vista and make it as invisible as normal hard disk cache. It hasn’t yet hit the server chips, but is expected to by this time next year. From a server virtualization point-of-view, this is important since disk I/O is one of the biggest problems with getting a large physical-to-virtual machine ratio. As each virtual machine is accessed, it calls for disk access to it’s virtual disks, as these requests go to the hardware via the hypervisor and/or host OS, they queue up, slowing down performance. The Turbo Memory concept is one that can be applied to help mitigate this problem. As it stands, I may just get a Vista Desktop with dual disks and Turbo Memory, load it up w/ 4GB RAM, and throw in a huge number of VMs via VMware Server and then via Virtual PC. Throw in some load simulation scripts, perfmon logging and a little elbow grease, and I might have some interesting numbers to show against an entry-level server running W2K3 and similar hardware. The test won’t be worth much on the books, since Vista’s got client-related limitation that make it an inefficient platform (10 connections, anyone?) for hosting virtual machines, but for the fun of it and for the raw numbers that show what Turbo Memory can do, it’ll be worthwhile.

While there I also met the Regional Director for Virtual Iron, who I’m going to be following up with to see about getting my Virtual Iron demo rolling.

Going back to my “poker-based” review system, I give turbo memory’s concept a solid 9 pokers.