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48 BladeSymphony 1000 Architecture White Paper www.hitachi.com
Chapter 9
Virtage
Virtage is a key technical differentiator for BladeSymphony 1000. It brings mainframe-class virtualization
to blade computing. Leveraging Hitachi’s decades of development work on mainframe virtualization
technology, Virtage delivers high-performance, extremely reliable, and transparent virtualization for
Dual-Core Intel Itanium and Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor-based server blades.
Virtage is built-in and requires no separate operating system layer or third-party virtualization software,
so it safely shares or isolates resources among partitions without the performance hit of traditional
software-only virtualization solutions. It is tuned specifically for BladeSymphony 1000 and is extensively
tested in enterprise production environments. Virtage is designed to deliver a higher level of stability,
manageability, performance, throughput, and reliability than comparable virtualization technology, and it
sets a new standard for on-demand infrastructure provisioning. Virtage offers a number of benefits
including:
• Reduced number of facial servers through consolidation and virtualization
• Increased server utilization rates
• Isolation of applications for increased reliability and security
• Improved manageability
• Simplified deployment
• Support for legacy systems
Virtage is Hypervisor-type virtualization, and therefore has a natural performance advantage over host-
emulation virtualization offerings because guest operating systems can be simply and directly executed
on virtualized environment without host intervention. Virtage leverages Intel’s Virtualization Technology
(VT) to help ensure that processor performance is optimized for the virtual environment, and to provide
a stable platform that incorporates virtualization into the hardware layer.
Virtage can partition physical server resources by constructing multiple logical partitions (LPARs) that
are isolated, and each of these environments can run independently. A different operating system
(called a Guest operating system) can run on each LPAR on a single physical server.
The BladeSymphony1000 Server Blades can run in basic mode (non-virtualized), or with Virtage. The
Virtage feature is embedded within the system and can be activated or de-activated based on
customer needs. Each system can support multiple virtualized or non-virtualized environments based
on specific preferences. A single server blade or SMP can be configured up to 16 LPARs at a time.
High CPU Performance and Features
Virtage is Hypervisor-type virtualization, and therefore features a natural performance advantage over
host-emulation virtualization offerings because guest operation systems can be simply and directly
executed on the virtualized environment without host intervention.
Virtage fully utilizes the Hypervisor mode created by leveraging Intel's VT-i technology, which is
embedded in the Itanium processor. Therefore, Virtage can capture any guest operation requiring host
intervention with minimal performance impact to normal operations.