This week, ScaleMP announced the newest version of its server virtualization for aggregation software platform, vSMP Foundation 4.0.  The new release added more than 10 new major features to help provide customers with more choice when designing their virtual SMP solutions.

To dig in a bit deeper into what ScaleMP is up to, I reached out to Shai Fultheim, the company's CEO and founder, and found out more about the company's solutions, virtualization for aggregation and talked about HPC.  Here's our conversation:

VMblog.com:  Can you discuss some of the challenges around server virtualization for aggregation?

Shai Fultheim:  IT departments and organizations building high performance environments are frequently faced with doing more with less when it comes to managing clusters. Also, many organizations with SMP requirements turn to costly proprietary systems or have to rework their application code, which can set them back months. With virtualization for aggregation, clusters can be managed as a single system, and costly and proprietary systems can be purchased at the cost of a cluster.

VMblog.com:  What should IT be looking for when choosing a server?

Fultheim:  The ideal virtualization server would give IT the best price for each virtual server license by supporting more virtual servers per blade. In addition to containing costs, it is important to keep in mind finding a solution that allows configuring, changing and managing servers as efficiently as possible. When it gets to HPC, the above should be augmented with the application requirements - whether the need is for a fast processor or high amount of memory - in both cases IT should look for application requirements before choosing a server.

VMblog.com:  In the company's latest announcement, ScaleMP announced the new vSMP Foundation 4.0. What enhancements does the latest version of vSMP Foundation include?

Fultheim:  vSMP Foundation 4.0 offers more than 10 new major features enabling customers with more choice when it comes to designing their virtual SMP solutions. To begin with, the new release is the first to include support for AMD processors, such as Magny Cours or its upcoming successor Interlagos, as well as extended support for upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors.

Another large enhancement is VM on VM (nested VM) support, which consolidates multiple servers running KVM and Xen virtualization software to a single virtual system benefitting from the aggregated server resources. This technology delivers increased system utilization, better application performance and more IT infrastructure flexibility.

Lastly, we have made some significant changes to our pricing and availability. We have implemented a new per-socket pricing model which provides customers with a piece of mind focusing on the virtual SMP size, rather than on the size and models of the systems used. This new model allows for greater simplicity when it comes to selecting platforms for vSMP Foundation.

We are also offering floating license support, allowing for greater investment protection and enabling customers to purchase vSMP Foundation for the current generation systems and keep using it with platforms that will available in the future.

VMblog.com:  How will this latest release extend the capabilities of virtualization for high-end computing?

Fultheim:  The main focus with vSMP Foundation 4.0 is to support the most cutting-edge technologies available so that our customers can optimize their resource utilization and achieve the highest virtual SMP performance possible. As an example, this release embraces parallel I/O, which allows customer to optimize the performance of I/O subsystems in multiple servers in parallel. The main benefit to the user is that now virtual platforms are not only about size of memory and number of cores, but also about I/O throughput.

VMblog.com:  How does vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform tie into this new release?  How will this new platform help lower costs for IT?

Fultheim:  vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform is an extension of vSMP Foundation. The new platform offers customers enhanced capabilities over the traditional SMP capabilities available with vSMP Foundation. With the Advanced Platform, customers that deploy large scale clusters can now have on-demand SMPs provisioned by traditional provisioning systems such as Bright Cluster Manager, HP's Insight CMU, IBM's XCAT, ROCKs and others to allow greater utilization by making a dual use of the same systems.

Additionally, partitioning offered through the platform allows users to have different groups working on a dedicated resource rather than sharing the same SMP machine and interfering with one another. Users are also given tools to resize system partitions to accommodate their changing needs.

Lastly, using multiple HCAs in parallel, vSMP Foundation Advanced Platform provides improved performance for the most demanding applications. This unique capability removes the need for distributed application awareness for multi-rail InfiniBand.

With all of these features and more, customers have the flexibility and choice to create exact systems that fit their needs and reduce their IT costs.

VMblog.com:  For companies that are still early in their server virtualization plans, when is the right time to be thinking about virtualization?

Fultheim:  For organizations that have very large workloads, run high performance clusters or low-end SMP, beginning to think about virtualization solutions is always a good idea. Whether the end-user lacks skills to run clusters efficiently or whether the IT organization wants to reduce costs - aggregating all the cluster nodes to a single system eliminates the problem. With such a single system, end-users can focus on productivity and the IT organization need only run one server, instead of multiple servers.

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Thanks again to Shai Fultheim, CEO and founder of ScaleMP for taking time out to speak with me.