Section 14.3. Bigger and Badder Brains

14.3. Bigger and Badder Brains

Back in April 2004, VMware announced that its virtualization platforms would support 64-bit platforms within 18 months. Good as the company's word, VMware Workstation 4.5 and GSX 3.1 began experimental support on 64-bit processor hosts a couple of months after the announcement. VMware Workstation 5.0, recently released, now fully supports a 64-bit host, either AMD or Intel. As we've mentioned a number of times in this book, virtual machines perform better with more memory. The 64-bit architecture allows for huge increases in the amount of physical and virtual (swap) memory. Although ESX Server supports the AMD Opteron 64-bit chip, at the time of this writing, you could load ESX on a 64-bit host, in 32-bit mode only. With ESX 3.0 in a tightly controlled beta, we expect support for 64-bit platform hosts to take the possibilities of virtual infrastructures to a whole new level; thus, staging ESX on a 64-bit host in 32-bit mode may be a good idea.

VMware is definitely setting its sights on 64-bit computing. From a memory perspective alone, it's a technology that will greatly enhance consolidation ratios, thus making VMware's product have a higher ROI. Theoretically, 64-bit processors can address 16 Exabytes of memory, which is two orders of magnitude larger than a terabytewe're talking serious memory, here. Imagine having a virtual machine(s) running completely in physical (fault-tolerant) memory and writing to disk only during idle cycles…someday in the not-too-distant future this will happen. Now, combine 64-bit processing with dual-core (or more) technology and the power and brains of your ESX Server host increase significantly.

For virtual machines themselves, whether a 64-bit processor(s) is fully supported or not on the host (it will be), in the future four-way virtual SMP will be available. This, of course, will allow more robust applications such as databases to be virtualized. Some may say that if you're allowing a database access to all four of your host's CPUs, and your host is a four-way, then you shouldn't stay on a physical. Perhaps. But don't forget about the dual-core processors that are coming out. Soon your four-ways will be eight-ways, or more. Now, some vendors like Oracle have decided to treat dual core chips as two processors (for licensing purposes), while others like Microsoft have stated that they believe a dual core chip is one processorkeep in mind some of the physical-to-virtual migration logic. If your current database server (say, Oracle) is running on a legacy four-way box (e.g., four P3 1.0GHz processors, which was smokin' for its day), and you move into a virtual environment running P4 3.2GHz or higher, you'll see a performance increase.

Speaking of the ESX Server 3.0 Beta, let's tackle that in the next section.