20,000 concurrent virtual machines running Linux on a single z990? Seriously?
This is totally hypothetical, but as a VMware user I am curious : how do the virtual machines presented on the Z compare to the VMware VMs on an Intel box? Can you migrate the VM images back and forth between platforms? Will the VMs on Z also support all the other platforms that run on VMware on an Intel machine?
The reason I ask is that once the hardware has been virtualized it doesn't matter what the back end is, in theory, and I was curious how close that was to reality.
IBM is like Heckler & Koch (H&K). For most applications cheaper, less reliable solutions are plenty good. Sometimes (like when lives are at stake, or when failure is not an option) it is worth paying 10x as much for that extra 4%.
Silly question : lets pretend you are running a bunch (10) of Virtual Machines on one big piece of hardware, and on those VMs you are running Windows 2000.
Do you need one license of Windows because it is all running on one machine, or do you need 11 licenses (one for the host operating system, and one per virtual machine) in order to be 'legit'?
I ask this because of the way XP Pro (and presumably Server 2003) is locked down and needs to be activated on a 'per machine' basis - this could be a very real issue in short order.
I managed to bring down the mainframe at an insurance company a few years ago. I was there as a consultant doing custom dev for apps requesting data over MQseries to their back end, and one minor detail slipped through the cracks: The manager working with me on the project was mildly dyslexic and when explaining me the expected workload managed to convert one request every seven seconds to seven requests a second.
Two months later I am ready to test this thing, have created a special app that hits my engine seven times a second, sustained for 10 minutes (I mean because hey, if I can't support the expected workload for 10 minutes, how is this thing expected to run for weeks of uptime?) I sent a note to the manager that I was going to test and for 10 minutes during lunch that day hammered their back end with roughly 50x their peak workload, and in 10 minutes I had submitted more action than their back end generally handles in an entire day.
Every pager in the complex went nuts and every manager and IT guy in the place went freak show, moved faster than if the building was on fire. The 'issue' was soon resolved and I wasn't allowed to test on the production environment for over a month.
But generally, big iron only comes down for hardware upgrades during scheduled maintenance.
Almost forgot about VMware - lets you run pretty much any OS : DOS, Win95/98/Me, WinNT (3.5x/4.0ws/4.0S/4.0EE), Windows 2000 Pro/AdvSer/Ent, 2003, Netware 5.x/6.x, Linux... pretty much anything that runs on Intel hardware. All at the same time, as many as you have RAM for (it dedicates the memory allocated on a per virtual machine basis, so if you want ten machines with 256M apiece (plus 256 for the host OS) you need +/- 3G of memory in that machine - not common in a home machine, but not impossible either. All running on a virtual switch, inside one box, so network performance between the virtual machines is pretty good.
I believe that VMware is a direct spin off of IBM's VM technology we are discussing in this thread. I have played with it (they have a 30 day trial period to experiment with it) and it is very cool. Many posters in other threads (myself included) highly recommend it.
www.vmware.com
I don't know if it is still under IBM's direct control or if VMware is a new company, but I am pretty sure that IBM is the original source.
-At first when I read your comment, I though about the ethics of murdering someone who has not killed anyone else, but who has done a much lesser crime instead.
Hah - welcome to my world. In Texas it is ethical (and eagerly encouraged by the legal system / law enforcement) to kill someone for keying your car, spraypainting (tagging) the exterior of your house, bitch-slapping your girlfriend, or stealing the radio out of your pickup truck (in all these cases you must be able to show that killing them happened in the process of making them stop, no revenge killings after the fact.)
Life here is pretty black and white, and a thief in a $3,000 Armani suit is still fair game (ie, a valid kill target) if he is stealing from you.
The question becomes - can we interpret the actions of the RIAA as unlawfully depriving you of your money. If the search / wiretap was unlawful then in a roundabout way... yes. Up against the wall kokgobbler!
Man read this one with the one just above it (trivia about Crays using synthetic blood for cooling) and all of a sudden my imagination is going overdrive.
Get a coolant leak and all of a sudden your server room looks like the opening party scene in the movien 'Blade'.
In the 8th grade (like 1980?) I took typing in school and we had a strange smiling black lady as a teacher. I don't remember her name, but I assure you she wasn't fictional. And she would whack your knuckles with a ruler if you did not maintain proper posture or composure in her class.
Eight weeks was about all I could take of that business before I got transfered into a different class but I can type like a greased monkey now, and I still keep both feet flat on the floor and my back straight.
IANAC (I am not a compiler) but as I understand it CPU and RAM are not what make mainframes so much faster for large scale transaction loads than desktop machines... the I/O throughput of big iron is what makes them able to handle the bigger loads.
A box with a few 3GHz CPUs in it isn't CPU bound anymore - it is I/O bound (back and forth to the memory, hard drives, and users.) If a desktop box can get a 40% boost in performance by doubling the amount of on-CPU cache - that means it is outrunning the I/O of the rest of the machine by at LEAST 40%. Add 20 instances of virtual machines all doing different things and accessing different data and the difference becomes obvious.
Adding more machines with a 100 megabit switched backplane means 12.5 Megabytes (peak) of bandwidth between them. For some things that are easily segmented a cluster is a great way to get performance. And cheap too. But you are right - when failure (or going slow under massive loads) is not an option, and getting your job outsourced to India is not an option, going VMS on big iron is a win-win situation.
Honestly the infrastructure already exists, just substitute the word 'College' whereever you see the word 'Server' and Voila! it already works and is fairly cheap to use.
www.playerauctions.com
It has sort of an Everquest theme to it, but it would perfectly suit your needs. The biggest hassle, of course, would be making arrangements to make the purchase because you need to meet in person or mail them.
I think hardware becomes less fragile over time - I mean 10 years ago I would dress up in anti-static gear and use special polymer based tools inside the case of a 286 AT class computer but now if I dropped a 286 chip in the mud I wouldn't think twice about taking it to the water fountain, rinsing it off, shaking off all the water and popping it into a motherboard - and I am pretty sure it would still work.
Keep the parts in anti-static bags and based on what I have seen as common practice over the past few dozen years, cardboard boxes must be the ultimate in storage media.
Honestly old hardware is more at risk from being stepped on and cracked (or dropped, for hard drives / monitors) than static electricity.
It is VMware. I am still considering buying it - it is that good and runs on Linux also. I just don't have $300 in my discressionary bank at this time. You should check it out.
-Universities don't spend millions on a 'non efficient choice'.
Yes they do. Look at the football teams of most colleges.
I think you vastly overestimate the cognitive prowess if the administrative personnel at your college. Statistically speaking, 85% of the people making important decisions were C students and scored less than 600 on the math portion of their SAT (of a 800 possible max.)
I also imagine you haven't actually sat in on any high level focus and direction meetings at the CxO level or even the Director level. Most of the time these people are not NASA quality rocket scientists and engineers, and often decisions are made not on the technical merits of a particular issue but on how charismatic the individual proponents of that solution are - presented correctly in a smooth manner, serving three day old turkey chopped up into little pieces in turkey tetrazzini is something college level administrators will consider, and possibly even do.
My advice - when you are in a Director level focus and direction meeting as a technical resource, resist the urge to dream up the stupidest, lamest idea you can and present it as if it was a wonderful idea because they honestly don't know the difference and you will be pulling coax and converting your system back to Token Ring-16, unable to convince them that you were just kidding. No shit.
It was a joke, a parody. I'm not really Steve Jobs and I don't work at Apple.
The most I have ever had to do? Let me think back.
I was in college at the time, working a full time load my last year in school. 1989, as I recall. Working on my Senior Project I knew that if I didn't have unlimited access to a machine with a compiler (Borland's Pascal, for the record) I was not going to be able to finish it on time. The college had a computer room but generally it closed at 9pm or something insanely early like that, and was generally full of other students - so I knew I needed a machine.
I was making $5 an hour, working 40 hours a week (in addition to my full load at school)at a job 30 miles away. No parents, I was living on my own with a room-mate. I ended up selling my pistol (a nice S&W 6906 if it matters), the only thing I owned of any value whatsoever besides my motorcycle, and bought a 386sx-16 with 1M of RAM, an 8-bit VGA card with 256k of memory, both floppies, no hard drive, a 1200 baud modem, and a monochrome 12" vga monitor. I had some money saved up to add a dot matrix printer, and for a full semester programmed on that. Every day that semester I made every life decision, be it clothes, food, entertainment, liquor, caffeine, air conditioning / heating (I went the entire year in S. Texas without air conditioning, temperatures running 100+ for weeks at a time) to save money and when the next semester started I bought a used 40M hard drive, a 14" color VGA monitor, and another meg of memory.
By the time I was done the machine had cost me roughly $1,600 - earned at my $5 an hour job over the course of a year after paying for all my living expenses.
So yea, I hear ya.
Of course my last machine, the one I bought in May, I didn't think twice about. A new Dell P4/2.4 machine with a gigabit NIC, 128M of RAM, 40G of fast drive space for $300 delivered to my door took all of about three minutes on the web to configure and another two to type in my credit card number. (Where were these supercomputer class machines for $300 when I was a poor college kid?) Disclaimer - I have since added 512M of RAM, an SB Audigy and a Geforce 440mx w/ 64M to make the machine a well rounded development / game environment, bringing the cost to $500 total.
Just curious - what is the easiest you have had it when buying a machine?
You miss the point, or more likely you are getting me thinking about a more important point.
Yea, kudos for being able to create an information network that can handle running without a power source (by providing your own power gen hardware.) As we saw when NY NY was under attack two years ago the problem isn't lack of electricity. The real problem is that during an emergency everybody tries to use the network at once (ie, phone system, cell phone network, etc...) and just overloads it. In the event of a real emergency it needs to handle a slashdotting of users trying to get through at once, and the system as described (an 802.11b network running hardware a bunch of hackers bought at Frys) isn't gonna cut it.
You mean you are about to order another in a day or two... there is a pretty big gap between asking for one and actually getting one. Tell you what, let me finish this gig I got happening in Virginia and then we can start dealing with the customers that want to order G5 machines in the onsies - twosies quantities.
Sincerely, Steve. sjobs@apple.com
PS - Seven Mac's in ten years isn't hardcore. 1100 units ordered on one purchase order before they even ship (August, 2003)... now THAT is hardcore.
-You win the moron of the article award. Congrats.
Now you are one optimistic AC. The day is still young. I am giving 30:1 odds that there are going to be way better morons than Thinkit3 before this thread is archived.
-In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.
I agree, mostly. In fact I recently played with some shareware that I liked, wanted to continue using and appreciated - more than that I wanted to buy it as a way of helping them stay in business and continue to develop that line of software.
I went to register it and when I asked how much it was the email I got back said $300. Ouch. I liked it a lot, but times are tight right now and $300 might as well be $3,000 because neither fits in my discressionary budget at this time.
In case it matters, I was ready to cut a check for anything up to $100 - because I was pretty excited about the package. I wanted to do the 'right thing' but I guess that is going to have to wait until the tech sector picks back up.
I put in those squishy bright yellow earplugs - you can get them at the shooting supply section of WalMart or at the Gun Range in non-communist countries.
People can walk up behind me, explain their issue in gory detail, drone on and on about their family problems or work related issues and then ask me what I think... I don't care - I can't hear them.
Tap me on the shoulder and I jump with a startle, point to the earplugs and say loudly 'I didn't hear you, what did you say?'... they generally don't go for the repeat performance.
I get a lot of work done, though.
Re:Thermostats: They are *NOT* your friend
on
Cubicle Etiquette?
·
· Score: 1
That's funny. A decade ago we were having temperature wars during the winter time. The men (all computer guys, IT and developers) kept cranking it down to 72, the women kept pushing it up to 82.
One night I stayed late and after everybody left I took the thermostat apart and hard wired the gizmo to 72 degrees. Didn't matter how high the wenches cranked it up the room didn't get any warmer than 72 degrees.
I of course got busted when they had the repair guys taking apart the heater looking for problems, ordered a new heater, and it still didn't go over 72 degrees. Maybe I shoulda kept my mouth shut.
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20,000 concurrent virtual machines running Linux on a single z990? Seriously?
This is totally hypothetical, but as a VMware user I am curious : how do the virtual machines presented on the Z compare to the VMware VMs on an Intel box?
Can you migrate the VM images back and forth between platforms?
Will the VMs on Z also support all the other platforms that run on VMware on an Intel machine?
The reason I ask is that once the hardware has been virtualized it doesn't matter what the back end is, in theory, and I was curious how close that was to reality.
IBM is like Heckler & Koch (H&K). For most applications cheaper, less reliable solutions are plenty good. Sometimes (like when lives are at stake, or when failure is not an option) it is worth paying 10x as much for that extra 4%.
Silly question : lets pretend you are running a bunch (10) of Virtual Machines on one big piece of hardware, and on those VMs you are running Windows 2000.
Do you need one license of Windows because it is all running on one machine, or do you need 11 licenses (one for the host operating system, and one per virtual machine) in order to be 'legit'?
I ask this because of the way XP Pro (and presumably Server 2003) is locked down and needs to be activated on a 'per machine' basis - this could be a very real issue in short order.
I managed to bring down the mainframe at an insurance company a few years ago. I was there as a consultant doing custom dev for apps requesting data over MQseries to their back end, and one minor detail slipped through the cracks :
The manager working with me on the project was mildly dyslexic and when explaining me the expected workload managed to convert one request every seven seconds to seven requests a second.
Two months later I am ready to test this thing, have created a special app that hits my engine seven times a second, sustained for 10 minutes (I mean because hey, if I can't support the expected workload for 10 minutes, how is this thing expected to run for weeks of uptime?) I sent a note to the manager that I was going to test and for 10 minutes during lunch that day hammered their back end with roughly 50x their peak workload, and in 10 minutes I had submitted more action than their back end generally handles in an entire day.
Every pager in the complex went nuts and every manager and IT guy in the place went freak show, moved faster than if the building was on fire. The 'issue' was soon resolved and I wasn't allowed to test on the production environment for over a month.
But generally, big iron only comes down for hardware upgrades during scheduled maintenance.
Almost forgot about VMware - lets you run pretty much any OS : DOS, Win95/98/Me, WinNT (3.5x/4.0ws/4.0S/4.0EE), Windows 2000 Pro/AdvSer/Ent, 2003, Netware 5.x/6.x, Linux ... pretty much anything that runs on Intel hardware. All at the same time, as many as you have RAM for (it dedicates the memory allocated on a per virtual machine basis, so if you want ten machines with 256M apiece (plus 256 for the host OS) you need +/- 3G of memory in that machine - not common in a home machine, but not impossible either. All running on a virtual switch, inside one box, so network performance between the virtual machines is pretty good.
I believe that VMware is a direct spin off of IBM's VM technology we are discussing in this thread. I have played with it (they have a 30 day trial period to experiment with it) and it is very cool. Many posters in other threads (myself included) highly recommend it.
www.vmware.com
I don't know if it is still under IBM's direct control or if VMware is a new company, but I am pretty sure that IBM is the original source.
79 SCSI u320 9G/18G drives at the entry level? I guess that explains why the mainframe I/O is so much faster than my puny desktop machine.
-At first when I read your comment, I though about the ethics of murdering someone who has not killed anyone else, but who has done a much lesser crime instead.
... yes. Up against the wall kokgobbler!
Hah - welcome to my world. In Texas it is ethical (and eagerly encouraged by the legal system / law enforcement) to kill someone for keying your car, spraypainting (tagging) the exterior of your house, bitch-slapping your girlfriend, or stealing the radio out of your pickup truck (in all these cases you must be able to show that killing them happened in the process of making them stop, no revenge killings after the fact.)
Life here is pretty black and white, and a thief in a $3,000 Armani suit is still fair game (ie, a valid kill target) if he is stealing from you.
The question becomes - can we interpret the actions of the RIAA as unlawfully depriving you of your money. If the search / wiretap was unlawful then in a roundabout way
Man read this one with the one just above it (trivia about Crays using synthetic blood for cooling) and all of a sudden my imagination is going overdrive.
Get a coolant leak and all of a sudden your server room looks like the opening party scene in the movien 'Blade'.
In the 8th grade (like 1980?) I took typing in school and we had a strange smiling black lady as a teacher. I don't remember her name, but I assure you she wasn't fictional. And she would whack your knuckles with a ruler if you did not maintain proper posture or composure in her class.
Eight weeks was about all I could take of that business before I got transfered into a different class but I can type like a greased monkey now, and I still keep both feet flat on the floor and my back straight.
IANAC (I am not a compiler) but as I understand it CPU and RAM are not what make mainframes so much faster for large scale transaction loads than desktop machines ... the I/O throughput of big iron is what makes them able to handle the bigger loads.
A box with a few 3GHz CPUs in it isn't CPU bound anymore - it is I/O bound (back and forth to the memory, hard drives, and users.) If a desktop box can get a 40% boost in performance by doubling the amount of on-CPU cache - that means it is outrunning the I/O of the rest of the machine by at LEAST 40%. Add 20 instances of virtual machines all doing different things and accessing different data and the difference becomes obvious.
Adding more machines with a 100 megabit switched backplane means 12.5 Megabytes (peak) of bandwidth between them. For some things that are easily segmented a cluster is a great way to get performance. And cheap too. But you are right - when failure (or going slow under massive loads) is not an option, and getting your job outsourced to India is not an option, going VMS on big iron is a win-win situation.
He was talking about bringing in talent from IBM's Global Services division, these guys bill out at $225 an hour easy.
Good luck at getting one in your door for under $160 an hour - if you sign a 1 year gig maybe but not for a few weeks.
Dude shush!
You are giving away all our good secrets.
Those RIAA fsckers are going to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution starts!
Damn, bright minds think alike. My first impulse was to come in here and say the same thing.
Too bad I didn't have mod points, nothing like an AC that has been flagged (Score: 2, Insightful)
Honestly the infrastructure already exists, just substitute the word 'College' whereever you see the word 'Server' and Voila! it already works and is fairly cheap to use.
www.playerauctions.com
It has sort of an Everquest theme to it, but it would perfectly suit your needs. The biggest hassle, of course, would be making arrangements to make the purchase because you need to meet in person or mail them.
How old is the hardware in question?
I think hardware becomes less fragile over time - I mean 10 years ago I would dress up in anti-static gear and use special polymer based tools inside the case of a 286 AT class computer but now if I dropped a 286 chip in the mud I wouldn't think twice about taking it to the water fountain, rinsing it off, shaking off all the water and popping it into a motherboard - and I am pretty sure it would still work.
Keep the parts in anti-static bags and based on what I have seen as common practice over the past few dozen years, cardboard boxes must be the ultimate in storage media.
Honestly old hardware is more at risk from being stepped on and cracked (or dropped, for hard drives / monitors) than static electricity.
It is VMware. I am still considering buying it - it is that good and runs on Linux also. I just don't have $300 in my discressionary bank at this time.
You should check it out.
-Universities don't spend millions on a 'non efficient choice'.
Yes they do. Look at the football teams of most colleges.
I think you vastly overestimate the cognitive prowess if the administrative personnel at your college. Statistically speaking, 85% of the people making important decisions were C students and scored less than 600 on the math portion of their SAT (of a 800 possible max.)
I also imagine you haven't actually sat in on any high level focus and direction meetings at the CxO level or even the Director level. Most of the time these people are not NASA quality rocket scientists and engineers, and often decisions are made not on the technical merits of a particular issue but on how charismatic the individual proponents of that solution are - presented correctly in a smooth manner, serving three day old turkey chopped up into little pieces in turkey tetrazzini is something college level administrators will consider, and possibly even do.
My advice - when you are in a Director level focus and direction meeting as a technical resource, resist the urge to dream up the stupidest, lamest idea you can and present it as if it was a wonderful idea because they honestly don't know the difference and you will be pulling coax and converting your system back to Token Ring-16, unable to convince them that you were just kidding. No shit.
It was a joke, a parody. I'm not really Steve Jobs and I don't work at Apple.
The most I have ever had to do? Let me think back.
I was in college at the time, working a full time load my last year in school. 1989, as I recall. Working on my Senior Project I knew that if I didn't have unlimited access to a machine with a compiler (Borland's Pascal, for the record) I was not going to be able to finish it on time. The college had a computer room but generally it closed at 9pm or something insanely early like that, and was generally full of other students - so I knew I needed a machine.
I was making $5 an hour, working 40 hours a week (in addition to my full load at school)at a job 30 miles away. No parents, I was living on my own with a room-mate. I ended up selling my pistol (a nice S&W 6906 if it matters), the only thing I owned of any value whatsoever besides my motorcycle, and bought a 386sx-16 with 1M of RAM, an 8-bit VGA card with 256k of memory, both floppies, no hard drive, a 1200 baud modem, and a monochrome 12" vga monitor. I had some money saved up to add a dot matrix printer, and for a full semester programmed on that. Every day that semester I made every life decision, be it clothes, food, entertainment, liquor, caffeine, air conditioning / heating (I went the entire year in S. Texas without air conditioning, temperatures running 100+ for weeks at a time) to save money and when the next semester started I bought a used 40M hard drive, a 14" color VGA monitor, and another meg of memory.
By the time I was done the machine had cost me roughly $1,600 - earned at my $5 an hour job over the course of a year after paying for all my living expenses.
So yea, I hear ya.
Of course my last machine, the one I bought in May, I didn't think twice about. A new Dell P4/2.4 machine with a gigabit NIC, 128M of RAM, 40G of fast drive space for $300 delivered to my door took all of about three minutes on the web to configure and another two to type in my credit card number. (Where were these supercomputer class machines for $300 when I was a poor college kid?) Disclaimer - I have since added 512M of RAM, an SB Audigy and a Geforce 440mx w/ 64M to make the machine a well rounded development / game environment, bringing the cost to $500 total.
Just curious - what is the easiest you have had it when buying a machine?
You miss the point, or more likely you are getting me thinking about a more important point.
Yea, kudos for being able to create an information network that can handle running without a power source (by providing your own power gen hardware.) As we saw when NY NY was under attack two years ago the problem isn't lack of electricity. The real problem is that during an emergency everybody tries to use the network at once (ie, phone system, cell phone network, etc...) and just overloads it. In the event of a real emergency it needs to handle a slashdotting of users trying to get through at once, and the system as described (an 802.11b network running hardware a bunch of hackers bought at Frys) isn't gonna cut it.
Neat experiment, though.
-I'm about to buy another in a day or two...
... there is a pretty big gap between asking for one and actually getting one. Tell you what, let me finish this gig I got happening in Virginia and then we can start dealing with the customers that want to order G5 machines in the onsies - twosies quantities.
... now THAT is hardcore.
You mean you are about to order another in a day or two
Sincerely,
Steve.
sjobs@apple.com
PS - Seven Mac's in ten years isn't hardcore. 1100 units ordered on one purchase order before they even ship (August, 2003)
-You win the moron of the article award. Congrats.
Now you are one optimistic AC. The day is still young. I am giving 30:1 odds that there are going to be way better morons than Thinkit3 before this thread is archived.
-In fact, most people prefer to do the "right thing" in most situations.
I agree, mostly. In fact I recently played with some shareware that I liked, wanted to continue using and appreciated - more than that I wanted to buy it as a way of helping them stay in business and continue to develop that line of software.
I went to register it and when I asked how much it was the email I got back said $300. Ouch. I liked it a lot, but times are tight right now and $300 might as well be $3,000 because neither fits in my discressionary budget at this time.
In case it matters, I was ready to cut a check for anything up to $100 - because I was pretty excited about the package. I wanted to do the 'right thing' but I guess that is going to have to wait until the tech sector picks back up.
I put in those squishy bright yellow earplugs - you can get them at the shooting supply section of WalMart or at the Gun Range in non-communist countries.
... I don't care - I can't hear them.
... they generally don't go for the repeat performance.
People can walk up behind me, explain their issue in gory detail, drone on and on about their family problems or work related issues and then ask me what I think
Tap me on the shoulder and I jump with a startle, point to the earplugs and say loudly 'I didn't hear you, what did you say?'
I get a lot of work done, though.
That's funny. A decade ago we were having temperature wars during the winter time. The men (all computer guys, IT and developers) kept cranking it down to 72, the women kept pushing it up to 82.
One night I stayed late and after everybody left I took the thermostat apart and hard wired the gizmo to 72 degrees. Didn't matter how high the wenches cranked it up the room didn't get any warmer than 72 degrees.
I of course got busted when they had the repair guys taking apart the heater looking for problems, ordered a new heater, and it still didn't go over 72 degrees. Maybe I shoulda kept my mouth shut.