Friday 12 August 2011
XenServer Linked-In Group
Tuesday 19 July 2011
Hyper-Dense Virtualization
Hyper-dense virtualization
Whether building a Cloud, running a web farm, hosting 100's of sequel databases or serving up 1000's of virtual desktops; hyper-dense virtualization enables you to run more of everything more VMs, more connections, more clients.
What do we mean by Hyper-dense? VM ratios of 5:1 even 8:1 are common; our experience is that a ratio of 10:1 is fairly easily achievable on well setup of the shelf commodity hardware. At VMC our objective is to start at what is considered by many as very dense 20:1 with 50:1 or even 100:1 being considered normal and our objectives being to go far beyond that. Without compromising performance, we believe it is not a case that you can have performance or density, we believe that it is perfectly possible to have both.
This chart from IDCs 2009 report on virtualization trends showed the split that their researchers had uncovered amongst 400 US enterprises using virtualization technologies.
Achieving Hyper-density
We achieve these extreme densities by employing a number of tactics:
1. Focusing on the physical specification of our systems; designing them without compromise and in such a way as to remove contention between components ensuring that the optimum mixture of real CPU cores, RAM and Network IO is in place to deliver maximum firepower where and when it's needed. We design up to a specification - not down to a price point
2. VMC systems are delivered as turnkey Appliances; with the hypervisor preloaded and tuned to the platform, we have spent several man years learning how to get the most out of configuring and tuning the various hardware, firmware and software components so our customers don't have to.
3. We provide software an orchestration layer; Virtual Estate Manager watches over the physical and virtual performance of the appliances, manages logs, issues reports & alerts, identifies resource bottle-necks and offers guidance on allocation of resources to ensure you get the most out the systems; whilst ensuring that you maintain healthy safety margins on all resources.
We currently support latest versions of VMware ESX/ESXi and Citrix Xenserver
Thursday 7 July 2011
More than just Cloud Music Services threatened by Kazaa founders patent ruling
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Virtualisation to Hyper V: Inside the Royal Mail's Internal Cloud
Tuesday 14 June 2011
VMC Benchmark Update 6 months on
Well, it's been 6 months since we reached the top of the leader-board at Geekbench and we're stil there. Check out the comparative performance data for yourself.
Benchmark results
Some recently published the results from Geekbench give comparative performance and ratings of VMC Server Virtualization Appliances’ vs the main stream.
Most of the ‘Hot-systems” tested on Geekbench are Intel Xeon based so in example 2 we also included an AMD vs AMD to give some idea of how much more punch our systems deliver due to the HPC approach we take to system design, component selection and tuning.
1) TOP Of the Charts VMC vs IBM & Oracle/Sun
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/top
2) VMC 1200Series IR system using 2 AMD Opteron 6176 2.3Ghz processors winning against DELL PowerEdge R815 using 4 AMD Opteron 6174 2.2Ghz Processors
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/compare/317797/294440
So it’s not just an Opteron vs Xeon thing though in our experience Opterons perform better in virtualization that the current Xeon range
3) VMC 1200 Series 2CPU system delivering nearly 80% of the performance of a 4 CPU HP DL580 G7.
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/compare/317905/303241
The HP server appearing on the Geekbench results is (according to HP figures) idle at 541 watts, and at 100% utilisation at 975 watts, assuming the CPU/RAM configuration that was tested, and that it had the same 4 port NIC that the VMCo had.
The VMCo system tested (the one scoring 80% of the HP score) was idle at 119 watts and at 100% at 307 watts.
The VMCo system that beat the HP (the 2nd link in this document) is 185 watts idle, 409 watts at 100% load.
So in this particular test, we are slightly faster than the HP box at less than half the power consumption while under heavy load.
Thursday 19 May 2011
Where does all that Datacenter power go?
I like simple charts so here is a great one showing where the money goes in powering the average data-center.
This is the picture on P&C costs in the datacenter comes from a Cisco white-paper available here.
Friday 15 April 2011
Introducing Hyper-dense virtualization
Whether building a Cloud, running a web farm, hosting 100's of sql-databases or serving up 1000's of virtual desktops; hyper-dense virtualization enables you to run more of everything more VMs, more connections, more clients.
The latest range of Hyper-Dense virtualization appliances from VMC deliver a tight, highly tuned integration of the worlds fastest commercially available server appliance and a choice of enterprise class hypervisors from VMware and Citrix.
At VMC we bring the disciplines of high-performance computing to the world of datacentre virtualization; enabling you to realize the full potential of Hyper-dense virtualization right out-of-the-box.