Hitachi Ports Its Virtage Hypervisor from Itanium to Xeon

Published: October 16, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The American subsidiary of server maker Hitachi has announced that the company has ported its home-grown server virtualization hypervisor, called Virtage, from its Itanium-based servers so it can now run on Xeon-based servers. With the move, customers adopting Hitachi's BladeSymphony blade servers can now have a single hypervisor environment that spans both kinds of blades in the machine.

Hitachi used to sell a lot of Skyline IBM-compatible mainframes in the 1990s in the United States and Europe, and a few years ago as it was creating its blade server products, it took its mainframe hypervisor technology and modified it to run on BladeSymphony machines supporting single-core Itanium 2 or dual-core Itanium 9000 processors. The resulting virtualization technology, known as Virtage, is not a software-based virtualization approach, as various X64 products are, but is instead, according to Steve Campbell, vice president of North American sales at Hitachi America, based on a hypervisor technology that is pushed down to the firmware level underneath the operating system and inside the hardware.

With hypervisors being trimmed down and dropped onto flash drives and also exploiting virtualization features inside X64 and Itanium processors, the difference between Virtage and alternatives like ESX Server and Xen may seem to be a matter of semantics. But Virtage is down in the iron and is more like hardware virtualization on the mainframe, and it is keyed specifically to Hitachi's own iron. The Virtage hypervisor can span up to eight processor sockets in an SMP configuration running Itanium processors; the BladeSymphony design allows up to four two-socket Itanium blades to be linked together into a single system image using special links to glue the blades together. That means Virtage can span up to 16 Itanium cores, and that is something that VMware cannot do. (VMware is limited to four cores at this point per image for ESX Server virtual machine, and it does not even run on Itanium chips.) For the Xeon-based blades, Virtage can only span up to four cores in a single virtual machine image for now, but it seems likely that it will span up to eight or 16 cores eventually, particularly with Intel shipping quad-core processors on two-socket machines. Virtage allows a maximum of 32 logical partitions per instance whether on a Xeon or Itanium machine, and those partitions can be allocated with as little as 1 percent of CPU.

The main differentiator, according to Campbell, between Virtage and ESX Server is that the latter can eat up anywhere from 35 percent to 40 percent of processing capacity--a statistic that VMware is surely to claim is not true--while Virtage, being implemented in hardware, eats up a lot less raw capacity to do its job. That said, if customers want to support VMware running atop Virtage, they can do that. So far, Campbell says that Hitachi has no plans to support the XenEnterprise hypervisor or related tools on top of Virtage. "Our decision to support Red Hat 5 or SUSE Linux 10 is based on what the market wants," explains Campbell. "It is not a big deal for us to support these as well if customers ask for it."

Virtage is built into the BladeSymphony 300 and 1000 blade servers, and it comes free with the systems.

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