VIRTUAL MACHINES

According to a post from David Marshall over at InfoWorld: In addition to recently settling their legal disputes Intel and AMD have entered into a 5 year cross-licensing agreement. The two companies will share enough informations about their servers to hopefully make them more compatible with each other. Potentially they may finally solve a very serious hypervisor compatibility issue.

Live Migration in a Mix environment

When it comes to live-migrating a VM running on Intel to an AMD server or vice versa…well you can forget about it.

You may not notice much of a difference between installing a Linux or Windows operating system on top of either a physical AMD- or Intel-based server, but there is a big difference and cause for potential problems when you are implementing avirtualization platform. While the hypervisor itself doesn’t necessarily care if it is being installed on top of an AMD or Intel host server, problems come about with virtual machines installed on these host servers later if applied in a mixed environment.

Live migration technology has quickly become one of the key enabling technologies found within a modern hypervisor platform. With it, a virtual datacenter gets the added bonus of business continuity and disaster recovery by being able to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from one server to another without any down time to the end-user or the application.

However, there is a problem — there usually is, right?  This capability doesn’t extend itself to servers operating in mixed mode with CPUs from different chip vendors. In other words, it won’t live migrate a virtual machine from an AMD-based server to an Intel-based server or vice versa, one of the reasons being that these two chip vendors have slightly different CPU instruction sets and different model-specific registers (MSRs).

No confirmation yet but will see.