A Real Partnership in a Virtual World

Virtual machines and working environments are becoming increasingly popular nowadays as they allow large companies and enterprises to consolidate their computer hardware base and better manage their informational infrastructure. As there are a huge number of computer systems capable of supporting a virtual working environment, there are problems too and a partnership between Intel and VMware is aimed at reducing them.

Intel announced that it will work with virtual machine software provider VMware on a number of new technologies that should make it possible for system administrators to move running virtual machines from Intel based servers to systems powered by the latest Xeon processors, without the need of powering down the virtual environment. Also, this partnership is aimed at simplifying the deployment and configuration of the said virtual machines and working environments.

VMware is presently implementing the software side of the Intel FlexMigration assistant that will be integrated into the company's Vmotion product that is used to mode a virtual machine from one server to another. According to the news site informationweek, this collaboration is expected to result in an easier way for VMware's customers to move existing virtual working environments to servers based on the upcoming Intel 45nm central processing units.

The partnership between the two companies includes an engineering collaboration and should ease the transition to a new server architecture that can run more business applications at the same time than an older machine and thus resulting in a dropping number of needed server systems in data centers.

One of the hardware architectures that will benefit from this partnership is the upcoming Intel Nehalem line of central processing units that comes with a much increased peak memory bandwidth over the previous designs and generations, which is an important fact when talking about virtualization capabilities.