[Info-vax] OpenVMS x86-64 and Amazon Web Services EC2 (was: Re: IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat)

[Thomas Laus]

On 2019-04-17, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2019-04-17 00:40:41 +0000, clair.grant at vmssoftware.com said:
>
>> Let's say I sign up for some compute time with AWS and I need to run my 
>> apps on Windows. AWS will give me a VM guest running Windows.
>
> Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 uses Nitro and allows either a direct 
> boot, or booting the hypervisor of your choice.  Microsoft Windows is 
> almost certainly not going to be involved.
>
> The hypervisor that EC2 uses is a heavily customized fork of KVM, and 
> Nitro uses a custom ASIC on a PCIe controller that offloads various 
> tasks, and otherwise operates like bare metal; so-called 
> self-virtualizing hardware, or as self-partitioning hardware, depending.
>
>
Amazon AWS is still using XEN on some of the lower end instances.

XEN: Hypervisor version 4.2 detected.
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz (2400.05-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin="GenuineIntel"  Id=0x306f2  Family=0x6  Model=0x3f  Stepping=2
  Features=0x1783fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,HTT>
  Features2=0xfffa3203<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,SSSE3,FMA,CX16,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,XSAVE,OSXSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,HV>
  AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x21<LAHF,ABM>
  Structured Extended Features=0x7a9<FSGSBASE,BMI1,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID>
  XSAVE Features=0x1<XSAVEOPT>
Hypervisor: Origin = "XenVMMXenVMM"

Tom


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