"George Weiss, Gartner's open-source analyst, recently said that Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of Linux over the next five years. He's right. Microsoft will fall flat on its face all by itself, and Linux will pick up afterwards. It's very simple."
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Member since:2005-07-10
Member since:2006-02-20
> Go with cheap hardware and a free OS.
Unfortunately, the realities of the way that datacentres are run suggest that Linux isn't a free OS any more than Windows, and you can be sure that either a) Red Hat will want payment for each instance or b) they won't and *if they need to* Microsoft will adjust their pricing accordingly.
If you want the support, or at least the offer of support, the Red Hat is far from free, and is in fact
quite costly compared to Windows and Solaris.
Its not clear that many businesses will go for virtualisation as much as some people seem to think anyway. My experience has been that project teams and support groups aligned to business users tend to get a private stack of kit, including ther own dbms and fileserver, and this is ultimately so that change management is easier to organise. If you have a dozen business sign-offs with different agendas and priorities involved when you have a sper-server upgrade or patch to deploy, its going to be harder to get those signatures. Its been possible to consolidate services onto fewer boxes for years, but we haven't been good at doing it.
Member since:2006-01-04
Basically, virtualization allows you to save datacenter space and probably power. Other than that, if you are not careful, you end up spending much more money for specialized hardware and software to do the job.
Go with cheap hardware and a free OS.
There is no doubt, that there are a lot of situations where the increased cost of more specialized hardware, outweighs the benefits of having to buy fewer physical boxes. However, there are also a lot of situations where such an investment makes sense.
And in reality, the costs of managing an infrastructure, is often much much larger than the cost of the OS and the HW.
The real advantage of virtualization is that we will be able to abstract your datacenter ressources from the physical boxes. This gives us a lot of opportunities to manage our infrastructure more efficiently.
Some of the advantages are:
- much faster provisioning of new OS instances (for development, testing or production)
- the possiblity to create test clones of live production (to test configuration changes & patches)
- ability to move virtual instances between physical boxes (OS no longer tied directly to the HW)
- ability to reallocate ressources between instances (f.ex at peak-loads such as months-end batchjob running on one instance)
While this certainly isn't something for everyone, I think that virtualization offers huge benefits for companies running datacenters.
Member since:
2005-11-16
What does virtualization actually save you? I would say it's a way of better utilizing your hardware so that it is not running near 0 percent most of the time.
In reality, unless you use a free OS, a standard/generic PC maybe with dual core, you end up having to spend more money on specialized hardware specifically setup for virtualizing. For example, the "blade" servers compact a lot of machines into 1 chassis. But this is expensive.
Also, unless you run a free OS, then you have to spend more money on the OS, as well as all other software.
In the end, the hardware vendors and software vendors make moremoney off of you when you try to virtualize your real world apps.
Basically, virtualization allows you to save datacenter space and probably power. Other than that, if you are not careful, you end up spending much more money for specialized hardware and software to do the job.
Go with cheap hardware and a free OS.