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Stephen Sprunk
Guest
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 Posted:
Tue Feb 15, 2005 7:56 am Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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"George Neuner" <gneuner2/@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:n2g2115t1jbbgfjhtngq2jn3cmbh5cnfg2@4ax.com...
| Quote: | But may not be the most effective use of resources. Some years ago, I
can remember laughing at a comparison drawn between the resources used
in the web server farms run by Microsoft and IBM. At the time of the
comparison Microsoft's site used hundreds of 4-cpu Wintel boxes and
employed dozens of people to adminster them, while IBM's site used a
couple of mainframes (forget which model) and a half dozen people.
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A friend's former employer had a few web farms in public datacenters which
each consisted of dozens of NT boxes running IIS. In each location, they
had to employ at least one person 24x7 just to run around and reboot
machines as they crashed, and once they converted to Linux (against
management dictates) it turned out they had five times as much hardware as
they really needed...
S
--
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin |
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Sander Vesik
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Feb 16, 2005 1:43 pm Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> wrote:
| Quote: | "George Neuner" <gneuner2/@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:n2g2115t1jbbgfjhtngq2jn3cmbh5cnfg2@4ax.com...
But may not be the most effective use of resources. Some years ago, I
can remember laughing at a comparison drawn between the resources used
in the web server farms run by Microsoft and IBM. At the time of the
comparison Microsoft's site used hundreds of 4-cpu Wintel boxes and
employed dozens of people to adminster them, while IBM's site used a
couple of mainframes (forget which model) and a half dozen people.
A friend's former employer had a few web farms in public datacenters which
each consisted of dozens of NT boxes running IIS. In each location, they
had to employ at least one person 24x7 just to run around and reboot
machines as they crashed, and once they converted to Linux (against
management dictates) it turned out they had five times as much hardware as
they really needed...
|
To be brutaly honest, they simply had way incomptently run windows
shop in that case (esp the "running around and rebooting" part) and
probably hired people they shouldn't have. Taking people who are good
at running OS Y and having them run OS Q dependably gives such a
result and tells you little about the quality of the OS-s in question.
--
Sander
+++ Out of cheese error +++ |
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Alex Colvin
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:02 pm Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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| Quote: | for the mainframe batch system, there is a small matter that for 40
years (or more) that have evolved a "batch" paradigm where the
responsible party for executing the program isn't present when the
progeram is executing. as a result they have a long-standing default
design point where the system needs to be doing things automagically on
behalf of people that aren't present.
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Although there was also a long-held assumption in some mainframe systems
that an operator was present. Hence the semi-manual I/O transports for
cards, tape, printers. And the lack of time-of-day clocks.
--
mac the naïf |
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Eric P.
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:17 pm Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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George Neuner wrote:
| Quote: |
snip
There was a recent article, I think it was in InformationWeek, about
chronic under utilization of systems and the drain the "one app, one
server" approach imposes on IT budgets and personnel. The article
cited a number of reasons for why the approach is so prevalent, but
the number one reason given was lack of software stability, both in
the operating systems and the major applications in dominent use -
instability which makes it impractical to share hardware among
multiple applications. The result is proliferation of boxes that sit
idle much of the time.
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That doesn't surprise me at all. In fact there are financial
service suppliers who _require_ that their software run on a
stand alone system. I would do the same too if necessary.
I understand the reasons for it, at least on WNT.
In my opinion it is due to dll incompatibilities, which in
turn is due to not following Good Manufacturing Practices.
It is almost impossible to predict how a system will behave
and sometimes even sensitive to the order apps are installed.
But I still think fixing the underlying problems is the correct
solution. Virtual machines may make it more convinient to reboot
after a crash, but the situation is not going to improve until
the real problems get addressed.
Eric |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Feb 16, 2005 11:21 pm Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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Sander Vesik wrote:
| Quote: | To be brutaly honest, they simply had way incomptently run windows
shop in that case (esp the "running around and rebooting" part) and
probably hired people they shouldn't have. Taking people who are good
at running OS Y and having them run OS Q dependably gives such a
result and tells you little about the quality of the OS-s in
question. |
for the mainframe batch system, there is a small matter that for 40
years (or more) that have evolved a "batch" paradigm where the
responsible party for executing the program isn't present when the
progeram is executing. as a result they have a long-standing default
design point where the system needs to be doing things automagically on
behalf of people that aren't present.
this continued with the batch-based "online" paradigm ... the
responsible people for the deployed online application aren't present
.... even tho the online application is providing various kinds of
services for other individuals. the batch-based "online" paradigm has
quite a large number of simularities with the client/server web
paradigm .... where the sever side of the web paradigm is providing
various kinds of online services for the client side users.
in contrast ... most of the recognized "easy to use" interactive
systems have long standing design point that the person responsible for
running the application is actually physically present when the
application is run (aka rather than having extensive setup so the
system can automagically handle various conditions ... it defaults to
throwing it to the person that is presumed to be present, invoking the
application).
many of the batch oriented systems have spent more than 40 years
evolving their automagically handling methodologies. |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Feb 17, 2005 7:57 am Post subject:
Re: intel's Vanderpool and virtualization in general (was Re |
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Alex Colvin wrote:
| Quote: | Although there was also a long-held assumption in some mainframe
systems
that an operator was present. Hence the semi-manual I/O transports
for
cards, tape, printers. And the lack of time-of-day clocks.
|
so in the 90s we were talking to a large financial transaction
operation and they claimed that the two factors that enabled them to
have 100 percent availability for the previous six years were
1) automated operator
2) ims hot standby
i had done a lot with automated operator in various scenarios starting
in the late 60s ... for 7x24 operation (allowing time-sharing service
around the clock w/o requiring onsite person during "slack" hours) ...
recent posting
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#4 Self restarting property of
RTOS-How it works?
collected postings on the subject of time-sharing from the period:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare
and then did a lot more in the 70s ... at the time with automating
benchmarks perparing the research manager ... leading up to release of
the research manager there was over 2000 benchmarks that took 3 months
elapsed time (which included a system reboot between each benchmark).
.... some collected postings on the benchmarking (and other subjects):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#bench
as to ims hot-standby ... my wife had been con'ed into serving time in
POK in charge of loosely-coupled architecture ... and while there
originated peer-coupled shared data
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#shareddata
ims group was one of the few organziations paying attention since most
of the corporation was focused on ever bigger uniprocessors and SMPs
(as opposed to cluster solutions and protocol).
we pulled some of that together for ha/cmp .. a specific ha/cmp
reference
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
some collected ha/cmp, clustering, and loosely-coupled postings
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp |
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