Hey Ampere Developers,
7,000 VMs on a single server! Did you ever wonder just how much you can over-commit a server with virtual machines? It turns out, a lot! Ampere community member Lars Wikman pulled out all the stops to run 7,000 virtual device environments on a single 192 core AmpereOne M server with 1 TB of RAM. Lars is a Nerves developer – a framework to enable developers to run Elixir applications on embedded devices in an Erlang/BEAM virtual machine. Erlang was designed as a language for massively concurrent environments, which makes it a great match for applications where you want to take advantage of all of the cores that you get with an Ampere CPU.
With some ingenuity, he was able to maximize the number of VMs running before he started to run into "out of memory” issues on the server
How one community member ran 7,000 VMs on a single AmpereOne server:
-
By aggressively tuning Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM), he was able to reclaim over 400GB of memory in duplicate kernel pages
-
Each BEAM VM was running in its own qemu-kvm process on the host, with its own bootloader and Linux kernel
-
He and Frank Hunleth, the original developer of Nerves, built their own lightweight bootloader to enable them to test their Nerves VMs
You can hear about the journey from Lars himself on an Ampere Developer Interview with Dave Neary: https://youtu.be/1IEaYE5llgg?si=NPrqDU7upUeyvihq
Or read about all the details in Lars’s blog post, “5,000 Erlangs on AmpereOne 192 cores” (written before he beat his record with 7,000 VMs): Underjord | Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core
Going to ICPE 2026? Check out our Ampere Performance Toolkit Tutorial The ACM/Spec International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) 2026 will be held in Florence, Italy from May 4-8, 2026. This event brings together a range of experts in performance engineering, and this year, the Ampere application performance engineering team will be there delivering a hands-on tutorial on top-down performance methodology, applied to AI/ML models.
The team will walk attendees through why and how to use the Ampere Performance Toolkit to identify, characterize, and potentially fix, performance problems on Ampere and other Arm64 servers.
Find out more about the tutorial and register to attend on the ICPE website: Tutorials: ICPE 2026
Ampere Developer Impact Live Save the date for May 14th. We will be recording our second Developer Impact Live with Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and maintainer of the Linux -stable kernel branch. Dave and Greg will discuss the history of Linux on Arm, standardization of Arm64, and how he moved from the friction of cross-compiling to a native Arm64 workflow using a 128-core Ampere Altra server. Register here. Update - if you follow the registration link, you can view the entire event or go here to an edited version on our YouTube channnel.
Ampere YouTube New Releases Ampere Computing’s YouTube page has two new videos out. Conversations with Dr. RJ Rowling about how he uses his two 160 core Ampere Altras for his classes at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and Part 2 of our conversation with Ampere’s Bhakti Hinduja about the Ampere Performance Toolkit and how it helps with porting to Ampere and getting the best performance out of your server.
Your Voice Matters: Join the Ampere Developer Community!
Got questions? Want to share your insights? Or just looking to connect with fellow Ampere enthusiasts and experts? Our Ampere Developer Community Forum is the place to be!
Join the conversation: https://community.amperecomputing.com
Happy coding and see you in the next edition!
The Ampere Developer Relations Team Subject: Running 7,000 VMs on a single AmpereOne server
Body:
Hey Ampere Developers,
7,000 VMs on a single server! Did you ever wonder just how much you can over-commit a server with virtual machines? It turns out, a lot! Ampere community member Lars Wikman pulled out all the stops to run 7,000 virtual device environments on a single 192 core AmpereOne M server with 1 TB of RAM. Lars is a Nerves developer – a framework to enable developers to run Elixir applications on embedded devices in an Erlang/BEAM virtual machine. Erlang was designed as a language for massively concurrent environments, which makes it a great match for applications where you want to take advantage of all of the cores that you get with an Ampere CPU.
With some ingenuity, he was able to maximize the number of VMs running before he started to run into "out of memory” issues on the server
How one community member ran 7,000 VMs on a single AmpereOne server:
-
By aggressively tuning Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM), he was able to reclaim over 400GB of memory in duplicate kernel pages
-
Each BEAM VM was running in its own qemu-kvm process on the host, with its own bootloader and Linux kernel
-
He and Frank Hunleth, the original developer of Nerves, built their own lightweight bootloader to enable them to test their Nerves VMs
You can hear about the journey from Lars himself on an Ampere Developer Interview with Dave Neary: https://youtu.be/1IEaYE5llgg?si=NPrqDU7upUeyvihq
Or read about all the details in Lars’s blog post, “5,000 Erlangs on AmpereOne 192 cores” (written before he beat his record with 7,000 VMs): Underjord | Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core
Going to ICPE 2026? Check out our Ampere Performance Toolkit Tutorial The ACM/Spec International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) 2026 will be held in Florence, Italy from May 4-8, 2026. This event brings together a range of experts in performance engineering, and this year, the Ampere application performance engineering team will be there delivering a hands-on tutorial on top-down performance methodology, applied to AI/ML models.
The team will walk attendees through why and how to use the Ampere Performance Toolkit to identify, characterize, and potentially fix, performance problems on Ampere and other Arm64 servers.
Find out more about the tutorial and register to attend on the ICPE website: Tutorials: ICPE 2026
Ampere Developer Impact Live Save the date for May 14th. We will be recording our second Developer Impact Live with Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and maintainer of the Linux -stable kernel branch. Dave and Greg will discuss the history of Linux on Arm, standardization of Arm64, and how he moved from the friction of cross-compiling to a native Arm64 workflow using a 128-core Ampere Altra server. Register here.
Ampere YouTube New Releases Ampere Computing’s YouTube page has two new videos out. Conversations with Dr. RJ Rowling about how he uses his two 160 core Ampere Altras for his classes at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and Part 2 of our conversation with Ampere’s Bhakti Hinduja about the Ampere Performance Toolkit and how it helps with porting to Ampere and getting the best performance out of your server.
Your Voice Matters: Join the Ampere Developer Community!
Got questions? Want to share your insights? Or just looking to connect with fellow Ampere enthusiasts and experts? Our Ampere Developer Community Forum is the place to be!
Join the conversation: https://community.amperecomputing.com
Happy coding and see you in the next edition!
The Ampere Developer Relations Team