HP Blades and Server Virtualization: The Ins and Outs of I/O
The combination of blade servers and virtualization today offers a compelling solution for IT departments looking to regain control of their server resources, while offering benefits including space savings, reduced power and cooling, improved manageability, availability and flexibility Initially, blade servers got a bad reputation for not being a good match for virtualization This was generally because early blade servers were not powerful enough, and often did not have enough Input/Output (I/O) resources - Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel ports - to support multiple virtual server environments on one blade, not to mention hundreds of virtual servers in a single chassis As with all technology, both blades and virtualization software have evolved to better support the high performance and high bandwidth I/O requirements that come with initiating many virtual machines
In 200 , when server blades first emerged, they were designed to target a very narrow part of the server market — specifically scale- out applications, such as large web server farms, where the footprint, or the amount of floor space required, was the biggest concern
Immediately, IT liked the “idea” of server blades with shared power, cooling, I/O, and management, but, they wanted the blades to have comparable capabilities to their rack mounted server options, such as processing power, memory architectures, and I/O connectivity In other words, although these first blades were not meant to be general-purpose servers, IT users wanted them to be Based on user input, many blade server vendors responded releasing new blade servers that meet and even exceed the capabilities found in rack servers
Virtualization has had a similar history, in that originally, it was used in a fairly narrow market - the mainframe/large computing market - primarily for development and testing This specialized software allowed IT to efficiently utilize these expensive computer resources to their utmost capacity Again, around 2000, a startup company called VMware brought virtualization technology to industry-standard x86 computers Their first server virtualization release was in 200 with VMware GSX Server Today, they have improved upon and expanded their offerings to the most recent and sophisticated release of VMware ESX, Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3)
Together, server blades and virtualization are addressing many of IT’s cries “My servers run at 3 — 5% utilization rates and I’m being asked to provision another ten servers each running their own application I’m out of space; I’m out of power and I can’t stretch my budget or my administrators any thinner How can this be good for business?” However, the question arises, “Can the system architectures, I/O and operating environments designed for a server running one application translate to support multiple virtual servers and their applications?”
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