AMD Demos Live Migration Across Three Opterons

bigwophh writes "Advanced Micro Devices has just revealed to the public the first video and images demonstrating live migration across three generations of AMD Opteron processors on VMware ESX 3.5, including the six-core AMD Opteron processor, often referred to as 'Istanbul.' For those unaware of the strains in a server environment, live migration of virtual machines across physical servers is crucial to providing flexibility for managing data centers. AMD is also taking this opportunity to highlight its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which just also happens to be available today in beta form, that adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing."

Re:Nothing new?

[rachit]

What is new is live migration across different CPU generations.

I believe its using some features in the newer CPUs to turn off certain features / CPUID bits such that all CPUs look the same to the guest OS / applications running on top of it.

Re:Nothing new?

[Domint]

The crucial part is the 'across three generations' bit - I can tell you from first hand experience that VMWare ESX has problems performing live migrations across CPUs with different steppings even within the same generation, so the fact that AMD pulled it off across 3 distinct generations without having to utilize cobbed-together solutions like EVC is a pretty big deal. Or, at least it is to me.