I’m over at the Intel Developer Forum this week and blogging over at Intel’s IDF blog. Over the next day or two, I’ll also try to touch on some recent VMware-Intel developments, including Extended VMotion and NetQueue.
Link: IDF@Intel · RAS and virtual infrastructure: keeping all your virtual eggs safe.
Rich Brunner from VMware touched on a number of topics, but the basic challenge he talked about is the “all your eggs in one basket” problem as we build the datacenter of the future. As CPUs become more capable, virtual machine density becomes higher. Imagine a future 8-way server, with each processor having 16 cores (I said future), and 8 virtual machines on each core. That’s 8 x 16 x 8 = 1024 virtual machines on this hypothetical future piece of hardware. In this future, one memory error can crash the whole physical server, bringing down 1024 virtual machines. Yes, you will have your second hot server standing by, but it seems like we should be able to do better than crashing all 1024 virtual machines for an itty bitty memory error.
