With VMware Explore happening this week in Las Vegas, chipmakers are eager to show off their ability to support virtualized and “hyper-converged” data center environments, those in which every hardware element, including networking and storage devices, become a software-defined, virtualized building block.
AMD stepped up to the plate early this week, talking about not only how its Epyc CPU and Pensando DPU products perform in the rapidly changing data center environment, but also how AMD and VMware are providing an architecture-agnostic tool to help enterprises more smoothly migrate to new, converged data center infrastructures.
Robert Hormuth, corporate vice president of architecture and strategy introduced the VMware Architecture Migration Tool (VAMT), although in this case “introduced” might be a little misleading, as AMD and VMware have been developing VAMT over the course of the last couple VAMT tutorials, already made it available via open source, and VAMT tutorials have been available on YouTube for quite a while.
The tool helps users automate cold migration functions of VMware virtual machines without disrupting normal operations as enterprise IT planners prepare for upgrades from legacy servers to infrastructure driven by something like fourth-generation AMD EPYC CPUs, Hormuth said. He added, “What this tool was meant to do was to make it easy for IT to use within their existing tooling and scripting infrastructure… and really to help IT plan for those migrations, automate a given migration and then validate it.”
Ultimately, this helps customers move much faster as they migrate “from, for example, an older generation Intel microarchitecture to a newer AMD one,” Hormuth said, adding. “In the testing we've done, we've moved hundreds and hundreds of VMs in 30 minutes… on average, about five to 10 seconds per VM on a cold migration restart, moving from an older architecture to a more efficient AMD EPYC architecture.”
And why migrate to AMD? Hormuth showed off AMD performance testing and internal analysis suggesting “a system powered by a 4th Gen AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs and a Pensando DPU, delivers approximately 3.3x the Redis application performance and 1.75x the aggregate network throughput when compared to a 4th Gen EPYC system with standard NICs,” according to a company statement. “Additionally, servers with 2P 4th Gen EPYC 9654 CPUs alone can enable using up to 35% fewer servers in an environment running 2000 virtual machines… compared to 2P Intel Xeon 8490H-based servers,” the statement added.