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Java Virtualization for Server Consolidation
Steve Wilson writes "Cassatt Corporation has released new software that enables administrators with large J2EE farms to much more efficiently use their resources. In order to do this, it leverages the virtualization capabilities inherent in the JVM to create a single shared pool of hardware resources which which all J2EE applications can draw."
Cassatt's control software costs about $100,000 for a 40-server pool. Adding the Web Automation Module increases the cost by about $5,000 per server, the company said.
Ok, so I can run java apps that save me lots of money on server hardware... for $100,000. unless I want to spend an extra $5,000 per server (bringing the total up to $300,000). So how is this going to save me money? I mean, I could by a whole bunch of 1U Dell P4 servers each valued at about $2k a piece. 40 of those would be only 80 grand. Now, I'm pretty sure that I pay my adminstrators so they can make an informed decision on grouping two or three services on a machine where it makes sense (like dns resolution and dhcp serving) and instantly save me a few machines there. And how many of my mission critical resource poor services are executed in Java? This seems like a huge waste of money to me. Besides how hard could this have been to come up with.. I mean, Java is running IN A VM in the first place. run an identical VM on another machine, add a little code to allow transfering of processes between VMs and you've got it. I'm sure it's got some tricky aspects, but is it that hard that it'll cost $300,000 to do? Something's fishy here...
-=JML=-
PLEASE stop using that word. It's not right.
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Wow, you got an insightful mod when you didn't even understand the problem. The irony is overwhelming. Anyway, this really addresses a completely different problem than VMWare. It fits much more into the realm of distributed computing than virtualization. However, the JVM provides a *virtualized* platform that makes it easy to *distribute* the processing efficiently.
So, back to the VMWare thing, yes I suppose you could hack a cluster of ESX servers up to do this. Of course you would have all of the overhead that VMWare needs to introduce. This includes the host OS, world switch and priveleged instruction emulation overhead, guest os, and application image. On top of that, you would have to shovel images around your cluster to make it work so bandwidth would be a nuisance. You would also be severely limited in how dynamically you could reassign resources, given the requirements of the guest OS. And you would of course be restricted to x86 architectures, which may or may not be an issue.
So you could do it, but boy would it be dumb.