A Review of "Virtualization for Dummies: Sun and AMD Special Edition"

by Bernard Golden and Clark Scheffy

August, 2008
Reviewed by Michael S. Hines

About the Author
Mike Hines, Purdue University

Mike has 34 years of experience in data processing related jobs, mostly with mainframe computing. For 5 of those years he has been responsible for performance management and capacity planning at Purdue. He helped establish the first capacity planning and performance monitoring role in ADPC (now ITaP). He has served as a reviewer and session coordinator at CMG National.

Wiley Publishing, Inc, 2008, 50 pp
ISBN 978-0-470-29264-8 (Book not for resale - available in PDF format)
Available for free at www.sun.com...

I find the "for Dummies" titles an anomaly, because these books pack a lot of information in a few pages, in this case a mere 50 pages.

The concept of running multiple system images (logical partitions or LPARs) on a single physical processor is as old as the IBM System/390 Processor Resources/System Manager (PR/SM) that host multiple system images in software. As processors increase in capacity (processor speed and memory capacity) it became clear that using costly equipment inefficiently was wasteful. Consequently, the concept of virtualization migrated from the mainframe world to the world of Open Systems and Windows. Most Operating System vendors today support some form of virtualization on their platforms.

In this book, Sun Microsystems and AMD have come together to explain virtualization in their world of hardware and software.

While the book starts out very general (Chapter 1: Trends Toward Virtualization and Types of Virtualization), it quickly gets into specific hardware (Chapter 2: Understanding AMD Virtualization Technology - AMD-V and Variable Power on Demand).

    The authors describe how each of the three major hardware resources is ‘virtualized':
  • processors
  • memory
  • I/O devices
    • Network
    • Storage
    • Other

With virtualization the hardware becomes more important. In the classical approach one server hosted one application. Loss of that server affected one application's users. With virtualization many applications may be using one server. Loss of the server will affect all application's users.

Sun uses the AMD Operon Quad-Core processors to build large server hardware to host multiple virtual systems. Virtual systems require increased quantities of real resources to perform well.

Sun has a vision to virtualize the enterprise. The abstraction of logical processors from physical ones may be applied to clients, servers and storage. Desktop (client) virtualization involves a light weight visual display unit that interacts with a back end server. All storage and processing takes place on the server.

As usual in all Dummies books "Ten Steps" ends the book - in this case "Ten Steps to Virtualization Success".

For a short, quick read about virtualization in general I find this to be a great resource. If you're into the technology of computing (bits and bytes - as I am) there are things of interest here also - the internals of the AMD processor and how it is optimized for virtualization and a discussion of future enhancements specifically for virtualization.

The price is right - for a free download you can get your feet wet in virtualization - the why and how of it all. I recommend you take a look at this short booklet for it's overview of the how and why of virtualization.