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Microsoft Hyper-v Beta Tested Hardware List
January 10th, 2008 under Dell, AMD, Hitachi, x86 Virtualization, Intel, Sun, Enterprise Computing, Virtualization, News. [ Comments: none ]

Hardware requirements

Hyper-V requires an x64-based processor, hardware-assisted virtualization, and hardware data execution protection. The following hardware has been tested extensively and is suitable for use with Hyper-V. Some of the hardware requires an update to the BIOS, as noted. This list does not imply support of the platform for Hyper-V by the respective vendors.

Manufacturer Model Processor

Dell

PowerEdge 6850

Intel with BIOS A05 or later

Dell


PowerEdge 6950

AMD with BIOS 1.2.12 or later

Dell

PowerEdge 2950

Intel with BIOS 1.5.1 or later

HP

Proliant DL585 G2

AMD with ROM family A07 or later

HP

Proliant DL385 G2

AMD

HP

Proliant DL580 G5

Intel with ROM family P61 or later

HP

Proliant DL380 G5

Intel with ROM family P56 or later

NEC

Express 5800 120Ri-2

Intel

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The future of Hardware Virtualization
October 4th, 2007 under x86 Virtualization, Hitachi, Intel, Virtualization, VMWare, Enterprise Computing, News. [ Comments: none ]

Hitachi handheldThe news is that Hitachi has announced a new level of hardware virtualization, which could possible eliminate the need for any Virtualization software in the enterprise environment. By moving the hypervisor completely to the cpu core, it will eliminate the base os. Most products, besides some base os solutions using a custom os, require either windows or linux in its full potential to be running underneath all of the virtual machines. By moving this processing to the hardware it will improve performance greatly. There aren’t any publish statistics yet but it will revolutionize the industry. Why pay for software which is prone to viruses, crashes, and extra cpu cycles when it can be done by hardware.

But the real question is….
Why are we virtualizing to begin with?

The power of running multiple systems on a single box is very powerful. It is awesome for testing and deploying multiple servers on a single rack unit. But before virtualization became popular, people where running database, webserver, ftp etc on just one system for many years. Why have we tried to get away from this, because new software is CRAP. Software is no longer written as well as it used to be, and really depends on allowing the operating system do too much of its error checking. It seems like the reason why people don’t run databases and exchange on the same box is if a virus comes through and eats up the cpu, it will have the effect of an D.O.S. attack, making the database unavailable to other users. If some company decided to start from scratch, building dedicated enterprise servers to provide database, email, and file server capabilities to the enterprise network I really don’t think they would look anything like what we have now. I like Suns idea of containers, which as I understand it, the services run independent of each other isolated, but while on the same host operating system. All applications should be running in isolation. Also, there would be a finer degree of control. Why do a huge, probably over 85% of servers are running process for no reason. I have heard that finally windows server will be able to run headless. Something unix has been able to do for a very long time. GPU don’t belong in a server. Thats all for now, more on this later.

Sources:
Can new server hardware make virtualization software obsolete?