Doesn't matter whether you use Xen, Vmware ESXi, VMware Server, or whatever. Virtualization is how your customers will deploy your product, a way you can reduce costs, speed product cycles, and as a PM you should learn as much about it as you can.
So buy a well-specced out box, with 2-4 CPU cores, 4G - 16G of memory, several sata drives, and install a 64-bit linux with the virtualization solution of your choice.
From that point, create VMs as you need. You can even turn your existing machines into VMs with VMware converter.
As other posters have pointed out, you can donate or recycle the old hardware.
In my experience, the PMs with the best understanding of the technology were the most successful. The ones to whom technology was indistinguishable from magic were the ones who had unreasonable expectations, and generally unsuccessful execution.
So, learn, understand, but remember that coding (beyond limited prototyping) generally isn't your job.
When it comes down to it - HIV and AIDS are very easily preventable diseases.
That may be true, in the same, clinical way that lung cancer and obesity are easily preventable diseases. The complication arises when you try to change human behavior on a societal level. People consume carbonated soda and french fries becase it tastes good! People smoke because it feels good! The same is true of sex and IV drugs.
Add to this the fact that humans are very bad at assessing risk, and you have a recipe for the HIV epidemic.
When I was learning about Linux, back in the mid-90s, the most valuable resource I found was The Internals of the 4.3BSD Operating System by McKusick, Quarterman, Leffler and Karels. This book acquainted me with the design goals of unix-like operating systems, and the issues of implementing these patterns.
Also, I'd pick either Aileen Frisch's Essential System Administration or UNIX System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth.
Fast forward to the 21st century, I now spend the bulk of my time using FreeBSD.
Linux is great, but remember that the thing that makes it great is that it's a unix-like OS. Learning the skills to be comfortable on Linux, Solaris, *BSD, HP-UX, AIX, or whatever the flavor of the day, will take you further than limiting yourself to just one.
When shopping for a vacuum cleaner, we went to Fry's. The salespeople had no idea about vacuum cleaners, just tried to sell us the most expensive model:
"This one has a five year warranty."
"It says on the box it has a 90 day warranty."
"I'm sure if something went wrong, you could call them up and they'd replace it."
We went to BestBuy, where the customer service was refreshingly better.
That said, I would not switch to Speakeasy now, despite considering it over the last few months.
For me, the next card I select will be chosen more for the availability & functionality of open source drivers, rather than the raw speed of the chip itself.
I've just spent too much time trying to configure a Matrox G550 and a Nvidia Quadro 280 to deal nicely with dual-head. Both are busted with recent releases (6.8, 6.9) of Xorg.
Good cryptography can be important to a business, for the catastrophic case where a laptop is lost or stolen. I agree with the idea that open source cryptography allows more eyeballs-- in the long run, better security.
But data integrity is probably more important on a daily basis. And in terms of risk assessment, you're probably more likely to suffer some kind of data corruption than to lose your laptop.
It's been my observation that commercial software tends to be more robust in cases where a bit has been corrupted here or there. And in the worst case, if your encrypted mission-critical data has been horribly mangled by a disk crash, your vendor is more likely to be contractually obligated to recover your data.
Having said that, I'm happily using FreeBSD with GBDE.
This book reminds me of Marc Rockhind's "Advanced Unix Programming", but is less technical in nature.
The chapter on BSD make was interesting, a topic not usually covered because most people use GNU Make these days.
And the section on kqueue(2) was interesting, although very superficial.
Everything else would be largely familiar to anyone who's familiar with the Unix programming idiom.
As someone who cut his teeth on "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System", I'm eagerly anticipating McKusick's book on FreeBSD 5.2, to be released in August. http://www.mckusick.com/FreeBSDbook.html
Developing a filesystem driver on Windows is expensive and time-consuming. It's unlikely that there will be any free (as in beer) or open source filesystem drivers anytime soon.
Incidentally, I'd really like to be able to access my FreeBSD UFS partition in Windows.;-)
IFS (Installable File System) Kit costs about $900; see also http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/ifskit
I talked to a guy the other day that's getting ready to begin replacing their 1800 Sun servers with AIX boxes.
My company is porting our application (which currently runs on Solaris) to AIX 5.1. Despite the incredible developer support we've gotten from IBM, I've been shocked at the bugginess of AIX. Stuff that we take for granted on other Unixes doesn't frikkin work! poor support for gcc, broken JIT,...
until there's economic slowdown (like the past year in the tech sector). That's when the expensive luxuries get hit the worst.
except that Apple hasn't been hit the worst. The premium services will tend to be okay in a downturn. It's companies that are high volume that tend to be hit the worst.
In other words, learn how to spin your wheels for several hours, days if need be, so you don't annoy some poor hapless slashdot reader you insensitive clod!
that's right. In all likelihood, spending those few hours will help you understand the answer the third party will give you, when you have to ask anyway. And it will help you the next time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been very happy with m0n0wall running on Soekris hardware.
I have used m0n0wall, and have been very happy with it. In fact, I think I'm going to revisit it this weekend.
http://m0n0.ch/wall
When can I get a Raspberry Pi with a Pixel Qi screen?
Completely agreed. This shouldn't be on Slashdot. This shouldn't even be on ZDNet.
<Insert comment about shoddy state of journalism here.>
Doesn't matter whether you use Xen, Vmware ESXi, VMware Server, or whatever. Virtualization is how your customers will deploy your product, a way you can reduce costs, speed product cycles, and as a PM you should learn as much about it as you can.
So buy a well-specced out box, with 2-4 CPU cores, 4G - 16G of memory, several sata drives, and install a 64-bit linux with the virtualization solution of your choice.
From that point, create VMs as you need. You can even turn your existing machines into VMs with VMware converter.
As other posters have pointed out, you can donate or recycle the old hardware.
Good luck, and have fun!
In my experience, the PMs with the best understanding of the technology were the most successful. The ones to whom technology was indistinguishable from magic were the ones who had unreasonable expectations, and generally unsuccessful execution.
So, learn, understand, but remember that coding (beyond limited prototyping) generally isn't your job.
By this logic, all approaches except using Microsoft Windows have limitations.
By this logic, eating shit for every meal makes sense because it is easier and faster for the farmer than shipping actual meat to the market.
(Which is generally how I feel about Adobe Flash content -- it's actual shit, for breakfast!)
That may be true, in the same, clinical way that lung cancer and obesity are easily preventable diseases. The complication arises when you try to change human behavior on a societal level. People consume carbonated soda and french fries becase it tastes good! People smoke because it feels good! The same is true of sex and IV drugs.
Add to this the fact that humans are very bad at assessing risk, and you have a recipe for the HIV epidemic.
When I was learning about Linux, back in the mid-90s, the most valuable resource I found was The Internals of the 4.3BSD Operating System by McKusick, Quarterman, Leffler and Karels. This book acquainted me with the design goals of unix-like operating systems, and the issues of implementing these patterns.
Also, I'd pick either Aileen Frisch's Essential System Administration or UNIX System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth.
Fast forward to the 21st century, I now spend the bulk of my time using FreeBSD.
Linux is great, but remember that the thing that makes it great is that it's a unix-like OS. Learning the skills to be comfortable on Linux, Solaris, *BSD, HP-UX, AIX, or whatever the flavor of the day, will take you further than limiting yourself to just one.
Good luck!
"This one has a five year warranty."
"It says on the box it has a 90 day warranty."
"I'm sure if something went wrong, you could call them up and they'd replace it."
We went to BestBuy, where the customer service was refreshingly better.
That said, I would not switch to Speakeasy now, despite considering it over the last few months.
On the whole, the goal is to comply with the SUS. As with most operating systems, the difference is in the implementation and the corner cases.
The main difference I notice is 'ps'. The Unix spec wants 'ps -ef'. BSD wants 'ps auxww'.
Some information on current efforts:
For me, the next card I select will be chosen more for the availability & functionality of open source drivers, rather than the raw speed of the chip itself.
I've just spent too much time trying to configure a Matrox G550 and a Nvidia Quadro 280 to deal nicely with dual-head. Both are busted with recent releases (6.8, 6.9) of Xorg.
Good cryptography can be important to a business, for the catastrophic case where a laptop is lost or stolen. I agree with the idea that open source cryptography allows more eyeballs-- in the long run, better security.
But data integrity is probably more important on a daily basis. And in terms of risk assessment, you're probably more likely to suffer some kind of data corruption than to lose your laptop.
It's been my observation that commercial software tends to be more robust in cases where a bit has been corrupted here or there. And in the worst case, if your encrypted mission-critical data has been horribly mangled by a disk crash, your vendor is more likely to be contractually obligated to recover your data.
Having said that, I'm happily using FreeBSD with GBDE.
I wish. ;-)
See also: http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/14.html
This book reminds me of Marc Rockhind's "Advanced Unix Programming", but is less technical in nature.
The chapter on BSD make was interesting, a topic not usually covered because most people use GNU Make these days.
And the section on kqueue(2) was interesting, although very superficial.
Everything else would be largely familiar to anyone who's familiar with the Unix programming idiom.
As someone who cut his teeth on "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System", I'm eagerly anticipating McKusick's book on FreeBSD 5.2, to be released in August. http://www.mckusick.com/FreeBSDbook.html
turn on soft updates (umount /your/fs ; tunefs -n enable /your/fs)
Developing a filesystem driver on Windows is expensive and time-consuming. It's unlikely that there will be any free (as in beer) or open source filesystem drivers anytime soon.
;-)
Incidentally, I'd really like to be able to access my FreeBSD UFS partition in Windows.
IFS (Installable File System) Kit costs about $900; see also http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/ifskit
two words for you: shoe goo!
There's no news, there's no stuff that matters. It's all been replaced by a pile of stinking microsoft exchange weenies.
There's no Flash support on FreeBSD, but Mozilla works great!
My company is porting our application (which currently runs on Solaris) to AIX 5.1. Despite the incredible developer support we've gotten from IBM, I've been shocked at the bugginess of AIX. Stuff that we take for granted on other Unixes doesn't frikkin work! poor support for gcc, broken JIT, ...
except that Apple hasn't been hit the worst. The premium services will tend to be okay in a downturn. It's companies that are high volume that tend to be hit the worst.
In other words, learn how to spin your wheels for several hours, days if need be, so you don't annoy some poor hapless slashdot reader you insensitive clod!
that's right. In all likelihood, spending those few hours will help you understand the answer the third party will give you, when you have to ask anyway. And it will help you the next time.