VMware Introduces Four-way Virtual SMP

VMware kicked off its inaugural VMworld 2004 conference Wednesday,
announcing new virtual symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) of up to four
physical processors, a community for technical users and a channel
program.

SMP provides fast performance by making multiple chips
available to individual processes simultaneously. In the second half of
2005, VMware will offer four-way SMP as an add-on to its ESX Server
virtual
machine software to help customers handle heavy applications for
enterprise
resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM).

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based division of EMC had previously offered
two-way
virtual SMP in its ESX Server virtual machine software to let customers
run
applications requiring several processors, said vice president of
marketing
Michael Mullany.

“This is important because, with the recent shift by Intel and AMD away
from
clock speed as a way to get more performance and instead putting
multiple
processors on a single chip, it means that in the future even today’s
two-socket server is going to have four processors, and within some
period
of time eight processors, inside it,” Mullany told
internetnews.com.

Currently, if a user put virtual SMP on a standard two-CPU server,
users
could scale a virtual machine from a 1/8 of a CPU to two processors.
However, when Intel and AMD take chips to multicore processing,
four-way
virtual SMP capabilities will be needed to harness the power of the new
chips.

Mullany said with four-way processing, virtual SMP enables
virtualization
software to take advantage of the capabilities of a whole server. The
four-way virtual SMP is currently in testing and will be priced at the
time
of availability.

Fresh off of its third quarter earnings announcement, VMware is riding
a
wave of success as perhaps the most significant provider of
virtualization
software that consolidates server workloads by allowing multiple
instances of an operating system to run on one server.

VMware recently aired revenues of $61 million in the third quarter, up
from
$49 million in the previous quarter. The company has parlayed that
momentum,
which includes 2.5 million users and more than 5,500 enterprise server
customers, into launching an online technical user community, VMware
Community.

Like similar sites from IBM, Microsoft and others, the new resource center provides lets users
interact with each other and get the scoop on VMware products.

The concern, whose virtualization technology is also being used to
bolster
products by parent company EMC, said it is expanding its Virtual
Partner
(VIP) Network and creating a new “premier enterprise level” to meet the
needs of its more than 1,000 global partners. The company will provide
automated software to help partners access up-to-the-minute
information.