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Contributed article by Bill Pedersen, VP Engineering at Stromasys

Clever Architectural Mapping and Expansion of Host Environments are Mandatory in Cross-Platform Virtualization Market

Predictions or forecasts are at best poorly focused visions through a cloudy pane of glass.  The computing and virtualization technologies are constantly changing. Open source software and hardware are only contributing to increase the rate of acceleration.

Whether you look at the classic homogeneous virtualization environment or cross-platform virtualization, such as Stromasys' Charon product lines, you see forces pushing the technology to its limits, and the application of new technologies pushing the limits further. Compute platforms are being leveraged to virtualize the remainder of the information technology infrastructure.  Network switches, network adapters, storage controllers, and storage devices are all being virtualized on common compute hardware.

Much of this leads to new trends in virtualization, and is being driven by cost: energy costs, real estate costs, system utilization costs (the cost of money).  Some of the trends are also being driven by the need for flexibility and adaptability in the marketplace-software code is much easier to adapt than silicon-therefore competition acts as a powerful component igniting the trends in virtualization.

Among other factors influencing the trends of virtualization, there are efforts to improve availability, disaster recovery support, load balancing, and resource capacity management.  These factors are the same for classic, homogeneous virtualization, as well as cross-platform virtualization.

There are certain virtualization trends that are gaining momentum in the cross-platform virtualization market, including smart architectural mapping. More and more we are seeing hardware that is being enhanced to facilitate virtualization. 

Whether it is in the form of extensions to closed hardware architectures-Intel's virtualization extensions, for example-or from open source hardware, such as ARM, the effect is the same: more capable and higher performance virtual platform implementations.  This is fairly straightforward for the homogeneous virtualization market, at least in the x86/x64 architectures.  The cross-platform virtualization market will continue with improvements based upon clever architectural mapping, and instruction set emulation and translation.

Charon products currently implement virtual equivalents of the PDP, VAX, and Alpha machine architectures originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation.  Additionally, Charon now has virtual equivalents of HP 3000 PA-RISC and Sun Sparc architectures.  These changes have evolved from being initially applied on Windows as a host environment, supporting multiple virtual machine instances. Now these features are also being supported on Linux host systems and on VMware/Vsphere hypervisor environments. There have been also modifications on other hypervisors and on cloud platforms, including Amazon and Datapipe.  We continue to expand our universe of architectures and host environments.

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