Virtualization Appliances™
Introduction
Virtualization makes specific demands of a computing platform when compared to traditional non-virtualized environments. Aggressive consolidation and modern high-performance hypervisor architectures require greater amounts of memory and more efficient memory management than general-purpose computer hardware can provide. The latest processors can accelerate these virtualized environments providing close to 'bare metal' performance, but only when married to suitable systems and configured correctly.
Virtualized infrastructure today is very much ‘some home assembly may be required’ where the burden of systems integration is placed on the customer. This increases costs and deployment times while decreasing efficiency.
The Virtual Machine Company have taken all that we have learned in recent years deploying virtualized environments, and have worked with leading component manufacturers to bring to market an appliance specifically designed for efficient virtualization of mission critical environments.
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Business Benefits
- Better price/performance than general-purpose servers
- Scalability inside the box, means the platform can grow as you grow
- Hardware acceleration increases VM density per Server Appliance
- 2U format increases physical server density per rack
- Solid state, diskless operation increases reliability
- Pre-installed hypervisor provides turnkey deployment
- Lower power consumption saves money & reduces carbon emissions
- Comprehensive service wrapper brings peace of mind
Performance
The performance of the VM Box comes from careful selection, integration, benchmarking, configuration, and field-testing of industry standard components in a virtualized environment. Server vendors offer at least 40 x86 CPU variants, tens of motherboards, and hundreds of I/O options. Our engineers have identified the combination of components and settings that produce the best price/performance, reliability, and support for virtualization, and have worked with manufacturers to bring these together in one compact chassis. Each appliance is assembled from these components, specifically for us. Additionally, there are a number of technologies that contribute to our superior performance and suitability for the task.
- Memory Management Unit
Unlike mainstream servers, the VM Box has a MMU integrated with its processor. This allows direct processor-to-memory access, a key performance enabler.
- NestedPageTables
NPTs allow VMs to manage virtual memory directly, using on-chip resources, not software. This reduces the time required to switch between VMs by as much as 25%, allowing you to host larger numbers of them without wasting processor power.
- Tagged Translation Lookaside Buffering
This feature allows more efficient switching between VMs. It means the VM Box will not 'bog down' when used to virtualize workloads which demand a high rate of context switching, such as Citrix Presentation Server, larger Java applications, and interactive multi-user systems with a high rate of concurrency.
- Software acceleration
By tightly controlling the configuration of hardware and software, we have been able to tune the appliance to maximise performance gains and to develop our own software for accelerating in-box processes such as VM switching, process caching and virtual memory management.
In-box Scaling & Field Upgrades
The Virtual Server Appliance protects your capital investment with in-box scaling. No need to scrap the hardware every few years: our systems are designed to be field upgradeable, system update packs may be installed that will increase the power and performance of your existing Virtual Server Appliance, without affecting your warranty or support agreements. As core densities and RAM capacity increase, we promise to keep offering supported upgrades for your existing systems as long as it is possible to do so.
Rack Density & Environmental Focus
Space and power are valuable commodities, particularly within major cities. The VSA Appliance packs a lot of virtualization punch into a small package, and while blades may offer greater core density, the VSA’s small size, large memory capacity and multi-core capability delivers superior virtual machine density. As a diskless, single board appliance, with two of the world's most efficient fully redundant PSUs onboard, it is also cheaper to power and cool, and is fully RoHS compliant.
Ease Of Deployment
Each VSA Appliance is shipped with a turnkey setup, pre-installed hypervisor, and essential networking and storage configuration. Virtual Machine Company partners offer an on-site installation service where certified engineers will fully integrate the appliance with your networking and storage before handing it over to in-house systems managers. Racked and rolling in just a few minutes your new VSA appliance will join your existing virtualization pool and quickly be ready to accept your business critical VMs.
Field Service & Support
As a diskless single board appliance, with dual redundant PSUs, LAN adaptors, and dedicated management NIC, the Virtual Server Appliance is extremely reliable. When deployed as part of a pool or cluster in a virtualized environment, hardware failures do not result in significant VM downtime. Should the VSA suffer a hardware failure, all systems have a 3-year next business day on-site contract available.