White Papers for Download - July/August 2013 Update Jul 30, 2013 KVM has earned a reputation as the highest performing hypervisor in virtualization benchmarks, holding the top seven results in SPECvirt_sc2010 and recently achieving leadership results on SAP's 2-tier SD benchmark and TPC-C benchmark. One of the key ingredients to this success is KVM's ability to handle the high I/O rates required by enterprise workloads, such as databases, ERP systems, and low-latency financial trading applications that are running in virtual machines. This technical paper, "KVM Virtualized I/O Performance," demonstrates that KVM can deliver the highest storage I/O rates ever reported for a single virtual machine (guest) using the "virtio-blk-data-plane" technology, which is available as a Technology Preview in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 3 (SP3). Go here.An IBM Systems and Technology thought leadership white paper examines the benefits to organizations of using KVM technology to virtualize their infrastructure, and describes use cases in which IBM clients have found success with KVM. Most organizations are familiar with the advantages of virtualization and cloud computing to the IT infrastructure. But not every organization has taken the next step and begun implementing its own virtualization solution. IBM strongly believes that open source can enable both flexibility and cost savings for its clients, which is why it is supporting KVM for enterprise virtualization. Access “KVM and open virtualization: Who’s using it, how and why?” here. This new white paper from IBM showcases the capabilities of open standards-based virtualized infrastructure for achieving a resilient and technologically advanced infrastructure, and delivering a low cost per virtual machine (VM). IBM accomplishes this by leveraging IBM PureSystems as a base platform for IBM Linux Technology Center virtualization with various capabilities around server, storage, network, and virtualization management. PureSystems combine the flexibility of a general purpose system, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance. They are integrated by design and come with built in expertise gained from decades of experience to deliver a simplified IT experience. Access the paper, “Getting more out of your IBM PureFlex system with KVM,” here. A white paper from Gabriel Consulting Group finds that – contrary to the conventional wisdom, not to mention self-serving advice from virtually every vendor that data centers should strive toward standardization as much as possible – companies are actually using a wide range of different hypervisors to a greater extent than anticipated. Go here to access the white paper, “Hyperversity’ Rages On.” "Hyperversity" Driven by Technical & Cost Differences – Further analysis of the results of the latest Gabriel Consulting x86 Data Center Survey shows that hypervisor diversity is set to continue, with the average x86 enterprise customer using three different hypervisors to virtualize their workloads, and that most customers choosing multiple hypervisors are focused on cost and technical differences. Go here to access this second report by Gabriel Consulting on x86 hypervisor diversity.