Here is a new twist to the “old” server consolidation story, literally.
We’ve opened up the beta program for the IBM System p Application Virtual Environment or p AVE. What p AVE does allow the consolidation x86 Linux Workloads on System P Servers.
You can take advantage of the Advanced Power Virtualization to move your Linux binaries from older Intel servers to just one(or more) Power based servers.
One of the things we want to get out of the beta program is some real world performance feedback. Since System p AVE will allow most x86 Linux binaries to run unmodified and take advantage of the Power based servers not just for execution speed and throughput that many Linux apps will experience, but allow you to make power, cooling and space savings by consolidating x86 server footprints onto System p and switching the old servers off.
From the beta announce:
“Applications should run, without any change to the application and without having to predefine that application to the Linux on POWER operating system with p AVE installed. The system will “just know” the application is a Linux x86 binary at runtime and run it automatically in a p AVE environment. Behind the scenes, p AVE creates a virtual x86 environment and file structure, and executes x86 Linux applications by dynamically translating and mapping x86 instructions and system calls to a POWER Architecture™ processor-based system. It uses caching to optimize performance, so an application’s performance can actually increase the longer it runs.”
Here is some more detail in a recent IBM p ave Redpaper
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/linux/systempave.html.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=242284
For those that don’t or can’t take part in the beta, IBM intends to make this capability generally available in second half of 2007.
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Sound like Apples Rosetta to me, but the other way around. Didn’t Transitive have this technology for doing low lever emulations to and from several applications? It pAVE works as good as Rosetta does, then this is a winner. Great stuff!
Thanks for the post, I hadn’t heard the comaprison with Rosetta, its an interesting one. I guess you are kind of right in that it goes the other way, but otherwise its the same, your Linux apps can run on Intel or on Power, universal.
I didn’t have anything to do with the PAVE support or working with Transitive, that was alll well under way before I arrived, but it’s worth mentioning as their are indeed some aspects of being able to use it in a virtualised OS running in a partition and powering off old servers that is on the menu and being discussed with a couple of projects I’m involved in.