Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Red Hat backs AMD virtualization

analysis
Apr 22, 20081 min

Red Hat is announcing Tuesday its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers. The company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP now is offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat sai

Red Hat is announcing Tuesday its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers.

The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP now is offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat said.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing improves the efficiency of virtual guest operating systems’ memory management, Red Hat said.

Red Hat also is offering para-virtualized device drivers to make IO workloads in virtual guests perform close to the bare-metal performance of the system, said Doug Shakshober, senior consulting engineer at Red Hat.

In OLTP testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux showed that a virtualized guest using Rapid Virtualization Indexing and the para-virtualized drivers had a 21-fold performance gain and reached 77 percent of the performance of a non-virtualized environment using a 16-CPU virtualized guest on a difficult database OLTP workload, the company said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 has been shipping since November.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

More from this author