AMD, in collaboration with Red Hat, have demonstrated the "live migration" of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor's platforms. The live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, utilizing Red Hat's high-performance open source virtualization software.

Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD's approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

Red Hat and AMD were able to achieve this feat through the combination of Red Hat's innovative, high-performing virtualization technology and the consistent and reliable architecture of the AMD Opteron processor.

"While developing this capability has been a challenge, we are proud to work with Red Hat to demonstrate it is possible," said Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Solutions and Software Strategy, AMD. "We are dedicated to working with technology partners, and even our competitors, to help bring solutions to market that address the needs of our industry."

"The demonstration of high-performance virtualization and live migration between heterogeneous server platforms helps to illustrate Red Hat's commitment to open, standards-based infrastructure," said Navin Thadani, Senior Director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat. "We are fully committed to bringing the highly successful open source model to the virtualization domain. With it, Red Hat delivers leading, standards-based virtualization solutions in terms of scalability, security and cost-performance.