Q&A: AMD's Margaret Lewis talks about the client virtualization market

AMD has introduced technologies to help reduce complexity and overhead associated with virtualization. What else does the processor giant have up its virtual sleeve?

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As an industry, we talk a lot about the advancements that have been made over the last few years in both server and client virtualization, and when we do, we often talk about those advancements as they have come from the software manufacturers or the virtualization platform providers like VMware, Citrix, Parallels, or Microsoft.

But there have been quite a few advancements made in the virtualization industry thanks to hardware and processor manufacturers. The server virtualization market has made great strides in these last few years thanks to additional processor technologies introduced like AMD-V and Intel VT. By removing the need to emulate certain x86 instruction sets, these processor technologies removed barriers to entry into this market and introduced much-needed speed.

Thanks to the many processor advances made in both performance and architecture, x86 virtualization now works fast enough and well enough that it has been given a great big push along the maturity and adoption curve. And companies like AMD are still inventing and enhancing their processor lines with additional virtualization improvements.

[ Check out InfoWorld's latest guide that explains the ins and outs of server virtualization | And keep up with the latest virtualization news with InfoWorld's virtualization newsletter or visit the InfoWorld Virtualization Topic Center for news, blogs, essentials, and information about InfoWorld virtualization events. ]

I was lucky enough to speak with Margaret Lewis, director of software solutions at AMD and a well-known personality in the virtualization community. Margaret and I talked about the importance of the processor in the world of virtualization, the role it plays within client virtualization, best practices for implementation, and where things are headed in the industry. She spends a lot of time speaking with customers and datacenter managers, so she had a lot of great insight to share with me.

InfoWorld: Thanks for your time today, Margaret. Can you start off by giving us a little bit of background about your role over at AMD?