Virtualization: Back to Early Fast Ethernet Days

With virtualization network intensive applications get offered 10 times less pipe.

By Enterprise Networking Planet Staff | Mar 9, 2010
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Before virtualization took over, network intensive applications would get a gigabit pipe; now we will be offering them 10 times less. AnandTech likens the change and task of running 40 VMs on a quad-port Ethernet to being 'back in the early Fast Ethernet days'.

"In the second quarter of this year, we’ll have affordable servers with up to 48 cores (AMD's Magny-cours) and 64 threads (Intel Nehalem EX). The most obvious way to wield all that power is to consolidate massive amounts of virtual machines on those powerhouses. Typically, we’ll probably see something like 20 to 50 VMs on such machines. Port aggregation with a quad-port gigabit Ethernet card is probably not going to suffice. If we have 40 VMs on a quad-port Ethernet, that is less than 100Mbit/s per VM. We are back in the early Fast Ethernet days. Until virtualization took over, our network intensive applications would get a gigabit pipe; now we will be offering them 10 times less? This is not acceptable."

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