VMware Previews Expanded SMP Capability for Partitions

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The VMware division of EMC recently hosted its first user conference, with 1,600 customers in attendance. The main announcement at the show was an extended version of the Virtual SMP capabilities that VMware previewed in March 2003 and started shipping in July. The company is also expanding its reseller channel and launching an online user community. The new technology, along with the channel and community initiatives, help VMware compete against Microsoft, its main rival in the X86 virtualization space.

Virtual SMP rides on top of VMware's ESX Server, which is itself a virtual machine hypervisor that allows a single server to be carved up into multiple virtual machines and then have different operating systems loaded within those partitions. Linux and Windows are the predominant operating systems used in VMware partitions.

ESX Server goes down to bare iron and creates such partitions, while the cheaper and less sophisticated GSX Server allows partitions to be created inside of a running operating system. ESX Server provides better isolation of partitions, and it is also the only version of VMware's partitioning software that allows a partition to span more than a single physical processor. With the current Virtual SMP, VMware can create a partition that spans two physical processors. Whether those processors are in a single chip with two cores (not available in the X86 market that VMware writes software for), a single server with two processors, or a two-processor slice in a much larger SMP server, two computing elements is the upper end limit of ESX Server partition size today.

It took VMware two years to develop this capability, says Michael Mullaney, vice president of marketing at VMware, because it is very tricky to manage the states of the threads and cache memories of two processors to make a single partition. Anyone can carve up a chip, but spanning many chips is harder because of the timing issues inside the electronics of the processors and the speed of responses that an operating system expects from underlying hardware that it thinks it is talking to (but which VMware's code is acting as an intermediary with).

That is why the four-way SMP support for a single partition has been in development for three years. Mullaney says that VMware had 4-Way Virtual SMP, as the future product will be called, running in the labs two years ago, but that it needed to do a lot of work in the ESX Server scheduler to make it run efficiently.

The interesting thing about this four-way SMP support is that it will work on any fairly modern four-way server (say one shipped in the past three years or so), and it will also work on future two-socket servers using dual-core processors expected from both Intel and AMD.

Mullaney says that about 70 percent of the current X86 server market is for two-way capable machines, and that only about 10 percent of the X86 servers sold today are four-way capable. But with the advent of dual-core chips in the middle of next year from AMD and probably a few months later from Intel (which is being vague about its schedule), a two-way server, in effect, becomes a four-way server. So VMware has to be ready to support this.

Perhaps equally significantly, many customers using ESX Server want to be able to create larger partitions for supporting databases and application servers. Two-way machines are simply not big enough for a lot of SMB customers, so Virtual SMP was limited in its usefulness. Mullaney says that VMware can extend Virtual SMP to eight-way partitions, if customer demand is there.

The four-way version of Virtual SMP will be available in the second half of 2005. Pricing will be announced at that time, but it is likely that pricing will be consistent with current pricing. ESX Server costs $3,750 on a two-way server (meaning two sockets) and $7,500 on a four-way server. Two-way Virtual SMP costs $625 per processor.

In addition to the preview of the forthcoming extensions to ESX Server, VMware is announcing at its user conference a new online technical community called VMware Community that aggregates the 10 North American user groups (which are independent from VMware but hosted for free by the company) with various corporate Web sites and information maintained by VMware itself, including white papers, documentation, and so forth. VMware reckons it has somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million users (the vast majority using its VMware Workstation product), and it wants to have a place where customers can go to vent and to learn the tips and tricks of making its software run well.

VMware is also announcing a new premiere partner level, which will give more co-marketing funds and deeper training to those partners who make a very strong commitment to creating solutions that involve VMware software. The company already had a professional partner level, which allows partners to sell GSX Server and Workstation, and a higher enterprise partner level that allowed companies to resell ESX Server, Virtual SMP, and other features.

Mullaney says that VMware was getting so many enterprise partners that it needed to further differentiate those who were making a bigger commitment to its virtualization products. With over $61 million in sales in the third quarter, sales up more than 200 percent, and over 5,500 enterprise server customers, VMware has a bit of money and market share to throw around as it competes against Microsoft and will probably have no trouble adding to its current roster of over 1,000 partners.