Virtualizing AdvancedTCA Platforms
By Ernie Bergstrom, Crystal Cube Consulting

Virtualization (via platforms such as VMware) has become a standard technology in data centers, allowing them to increase server utilization well above previous levels. The idea is to provide virtual machines that applications can utilize as if they were physical hardware. Software (a hypervisor) then maps the virtual machines to physical ones, essentially combining them and thus reducing hardware needs, increasing security, simplifying provisioning, and capturing legacy software. 

Recent advances have made virtualization appealing for AdvancedTCA platforms by permitting significant cost reduction through consolidation of workloads and physical hardware. Virtualization also lets TEMs transparently leverage multicore processors to run software designed for uniprocessors.For example, VirtualLogix’s Carrier Grade Virtualization (CGV) targets more than core network equipment; it works with many equipment types (such as network appliances, firewalls, gateways, and mid-tier routers) and lets TEMs realize higher availability without rearchitecting hardware or software platforms.

Virtualization helps with providing turnkey customer solutions from both technical and financial points of view. On the technical side, it can help developers implement fault granularity, detection, and resolution, as well as overall security. Also virtualization relieves OSes and applications from explicit scaling burdens, presenting each guest OS and stack with uniprocessor virtual machines. Carrier Grade Virtualization introduces a new software layer and new objects in carrier grade systems. These objects (such as the hypervisor, virtual machines, and virtual devices) require management and control. As equipment builders increasingly turn to COTS, such mechanisms must be based on standards-based interfaces, especially to avoid vendor lock-in.

The financial benefits of virtualization are many and varied, and span the gamut from acquisition (capital expenditures) to streamlined performance and availability (operational expense). Compared to both legacy fault tolerant systems and to hardware-intensive highly available configurations of COTS hardware (such as CompactPCI, AdvancedTCA, or BladeCenter), Carrier Grade Virtualization offers TEMs, integrators and service providers significant benefits, namely:

• Run on both commodity blades and custom embedded hardware (including Power Architecture, ARM, and DSP).
• Ability to provision with virtual spares improves hardware utilization and lowers the cost of most configurations. One can also implement complex redundancy and failover schemes at reasonable cost.
• Options for using commercial and open source HA middleware allows designers and integrators to find best-fit at best-cost for a given application.
• Better segmentation resulting in improved up-time and availability to meet stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Lower energy use from fewer active, hot, and warm standby nodes.
• Better overall performance from more efficient multicore utilization and load balancing.
• More flexible hosting offers more plentiful and cost effective upgrade options.

Embedded virtualization represents an important evolutionary step in the ability of AdvancedTCA platforms to handle a wide range of networking infrastructure applications. However, it is not a panacea, but rather a realistic set of requirements for, and capabilities of, a platform that emerges from combining real-time virtualization and high availability middleware.

Ernie Bergstrom is VP Marketing and Chief Analyst at Crystal Cube Consulting and a Contributing Editor to the ATCA Newsletter. You can reach him at ernie@atcanewsletter.com.