HP Technology Forum 2010 Highlights
Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 30th Jun 2010 20:08 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the HP Technology Forum 2010 via OSNews and just spent most of this last week in Las Vegas with five thousand other nerds of varying caliber. The tech forum is focused more on enterprise technology than that of the consumer, and-- let's face it-- even if any of us could afford a $30,000 rack of servers, most of us have little idea of what we'd do with so many resources except brag. Despite the focus on an area not quite as natural to OSNews and many of its readers, there was a plenitude of good and interesting information shared-- aside from that, the forum was simply fun. There were a few subjects that were especially eye-catching, though many of them not necessarily comprehensive enough to base an entire article on; thus this overview.
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RE[2]: Virtualization
by akro on Thu 1st Jul 2010 18:16 UTC in reply to "RE: Virtualization"
akro
Member since:
2005-07-06

As long as it less expensive to through everything on their own OS instance then to work out the kinks and resource contention at the OS level people will virtualize. Even the app vendors do it as the expect the machine to give them all it can. I can chop up at the hypervisor exactly how much memory and clock cycles a given vm gets. That is not a layer of granularity avaialble to me in most operating systems. For example take this example

One box running

MySQL
Mail
Apache

The MySQL database goes crazy for whatever reason and starts occupying a tremendous amount CPU time. Mail and Apache will be affected. Hence why people will put them on three different servers to protect the services.

I can instead VM those three server and say
VM1 - My SQL - 2 CPU's at 1000MHZ and 4GB Ram
VM2 - Mail - 1 CPU at 500MHZ and 1GB Ram
VM3 - Apache - 1 CPU at 500mhz and 2GB Ram

Once virtualized I can move both the VM and Storage tied to it between hardware non disruptively. If I want a true HA solution I can even run them in lockstep on another box on VMWare. Heck even clustering works so I can cluster between different VM's

It is indeed powerful features we get. Granted if Owned a big sunfire\superdome it may not make sense but that is a different market segment.

Remember competent IT engineers are not easy to come buy but I most people can set up vmware without too much effort and with hardware now a days it's easy enough to buy your way out a problem versus engineer it corectly.

By the way I agree Virtualization is band-aid for a broken architecture. I think the reality is that the legacy cruft won't let us do it the right way and right now I don't see Windows and Linux giving us the same advantages at the host level to dial in the resource usage by process we need virtualization does. By the way this won't change until the cost of Virtualization outweighs the "right way" Hardware is moving so quick most people have more Memory and CPU then they know what to do with. What they don't have enough AC\Cooling\FloorSpace....

Edited 2010-07-01 18:23 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[3]: Virtualization
by Kroc on Thu 1st Jul 2010 19:53 in reply to "RE[2]: Virtualization"
Kroc Member since:
2005-11-10

I don’t know anything about the enterprise side of things, but I always prefer an elegant solution. Our OSes have mostly failed us and we’ve come up with over-engineered solutions almost beautiful in their complexity.

I wonder what would have happened if Plan9 got where Linux is. All your resources across all servers and VMs could be freely accessed and moved around the pool just with symlinks.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: Virtualization
by xiaokj on Fri 2nd Jul 2010 07:28 in reply to "RE[2]: Virtualization"
xiaokj Member since:
2005-06-30

Again, +1 informative.

I do not agree with the 3 server scenario, though. Theoretically even OSes allow you to assign resources to applications, so that example should be moot, unless, of course, the OS is itself incompetent. In fact, the resource should be parcelled out in quotas rather than just assignment because MySQL should get more than the assignment when the other 2 are just idle.

Remember competent IT engineers are not easy to come by but I most people can set up vmware without too much effort and with hardware now a days it's easy enough to buy your way out a problem versus engineer it correctly.


(bold for obvious mistakes, and I don't have strikethrough for the extra "I")

Competency is a problem throughout the millenia. No matter what time it is, leaders have found out that paying the extra to hire competent ones (paying in effort, face and much more than just money) pays off. This is because incompetent <insert occupation> wastes so much that the ecosystem itself becomes unsustainable.

Witness all those big name brands that almost completely stop innovating. Ford after Henry's spectacular failure to move on from the model T, and IBM anyone? It is always the problem with management. Creative and competent types are the most difficult to retain because they know that they are scarce. The biggest problem with management is that they are trying too hard to tame volatility by policies that serve to both punish bad/dodgy behaviour and restrain the employees from creative production.

If you want to argue that competent workers are hard to come by, it smacks of incompetence (either as a manager or worker) yourself. Do not forget that you are in a recession, which is the best time to snatch talent. You get what you pay for, especially if what you pay for is clever work.

Reply Parent Score: 1