I don't know if you've heard, but Linux/Android PC's are moving 1.5 million units per day, with a half-billion unit installed base. At the current rate of growth Linux PCs will exceed Earth's human population in Q3 2014.
Yes, this is far more abuse than is typical for/., but it's the Friday leading into a three day weekend in the US - Veterans Day - so many of us may be more drunk than usual.
All of the basic hypervisors are free, basically because kvm is free and included in Linux and the rest of them don't want to die.
The expensive parts are the management suites, advanced feature enablement, and support, none of which you need to get grounded in VM basics.
Hypervisor overhead has not really been a problem for five years or so. Baseline host tin these days is 24 threads/12 cores, 192 GB RAM, Dual port 10Gbe and dual 8Gbps FC or dual 10Gbps FCOE, and some SSD backed storage. It's the cost of that storage bandwidth that is holding things up now, and less so the network bandwidth - not CPU and RAM.
The surplus gear I use for test/dev is a few old boxes with dual X5550's and 96GB and quad gigabit. It sounds like you're trying to make do with some ancient P4 Desktops. You may want to look at the recent AMD desktop chips instead. You can get 8 modern cores, 24GB RAM, and enough SSD to do test/dev for under $600. That would probably be more temporally relevant and informative without blowing your budget. You're not going to learn a lot about modern server hypervisors on desktop gear from ten years ago.
Sometimes a smart person will ask a simple question, not because he needs the answer but because he feels the discussion will be instructive to others, or yield useful new insight./. being a herd of nerd there will be many and apposite solutions and viewpoints offered. This is a legitimate Ask Slashdot question and should come up every year.
Having praised the question I probably should give an answer: "yes".
And since I've been accused of being cryptically terse here recently I should expand on that. All the major virtual machine platforms are free. A learner who wants to understand the relative merits can and should try them all, read, ask and participate in online discussions about them. Learn about the numerous available virtual appliances free and commercial as well. In the current environment VM proficiency is a basic systems admin requirement.
Schooling you is not my job. People pay good money for that service, or they learn their lessons the long, slow, expensive hard way like the rest of us did.
Nope. When the bad guys have got root on your PC the only way to restore confidence in it is to rebuild it from a trusted image. Likewise if your network admin has gone untrusted on your infrastructure you burn it down and build it new again. Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Frankly that's not near enough to stop a real determined jerk with skills, but thankfully we are rare. Don't hire us in the first place if you can avoid it.
It is not that hard to set up a service on a Windows server that provides backdoor services. If you have domain admin rights tunnelling rdp or somesuch through it is trivial. They can use outbound polling of http or dns or even ntp to violate your firewall. You can give the service rights of some other person like the cio for example. Those guys usually demand the keys to the harem. From there you can remote to any server or desktop, do literally anything. These tools are readily available and open source, and every serious enterprise IT pro should have and understand them because often your first job is locking out the last guy.
My point is this: STEAM on any platform is not an instant massive games library. Some people seem to believe it is.
Fine. I don't crave a massive games library. But when they bring Steam to me, I gained some cool games I didn't have for my platform. Kind of like when Windows Phone users were glad to finally get Angry Birds and Words With Friends long after they were passe.
Like those Windows Phone users I wasn't ever going to shift my platform to go to the developer so it is nice he is coming to me. It's doubtful I will actually play many of these games for very long anyway. No time for games.
It is very rare that I connect my tablet to anything but the WiFi at work and home, the hotel, store or restaurant that provides free WiFi. On the go I just use the phone. Sometimes I just whichever is closer to hand like now on my phone, over home WiFi. But I do have the phone, and if I want to share something with somebody else, the 10" tablet is a more considerate format, so it's nice to be able to tether. It's easier on the eyes for tech manuals and such too. WiFi 4g tether is awesome.
Tidal forces would cause an Earth-sized moon to cool more slowly, improving stratification of the molten iron core. This improves the strength of the moon's magnetosphere. Radiation is probably fine.
A planet like that almost certainly has a moon of the correct size and composition. When we get to the stars we will find that almost all have homes for Men.
Microsoft is wandering in every direction now. They are lost. "Where is mommy?"
I'm not getting the nerdfest invites any more and for once I'm able to attend. I might be able to bring a nice drinkable treble boch. Please gmail me an invite.
You're beyond clueless on the subject, because in addition to being ignorant of the issue at hand, you're also assuming the "neighborly relations" talk about person to person relationships
I was a white kid born in 1965 who grew up in the area commonly known as "Watts". Torrance is what we call that spot now. Not only am I not ignorant, I have considerable personal experience of the evolution and practice of civil rights in that area, and the reaction of the populace thereto. You are basing your social activism on your idealistic interpretation of what happened there. I was there, and know from personal experience what happened there. Don't you dare presume to school me.
I have acquired three Windows cloud desktops through services like OnLive. Through Citrix and VMWare View I have access to an unlimited number of desktops with this tablet. [...] My phone has LTE and hotspot
Can you use these desktops while you have zero bars? I can use my 10" laptop while riding the city bus without needing to spend hundreds of dollars per year on a cellular data plan. How much do you pay the telco per month for a cellular plan that includes "LTE and hotspot", and how much more rent do you pay per month to live in a major city that has LTE compared to a smaller city that lacks it? And what do you do when you run out of LTE data allowance for the month?
My tablet has the dock, so I can attach Wacom tablets, keyboards, mice, trackballs, and even Microsoft's Kinect if I want to.
Keyboards, mice, and trackballs I'll grant because those devices use class drivers that I know are in Android. But I wasn't aware that tablets came with drivers for Wacom tablets or Kinect sensors. Even the driver for USB flash drives requires rooting on a Nexus 7, and I was under the impression that things like Netflix would refuse to run on rooted devices.
Nobody in their right mind would pay more for a Surface intending to defang the prevention of choice implicit in it when they could just buy a Nexus 10
Unless they don't want to have to buy, carry, keep charged, and buy data plans for both a Surface to run Windows RT-exclusive applications and a Nexus 10 to run Android-exclusive applications.
I'm a metro critter I guess. Since I got this SGS3 phone with 3G, 4GE and hotspot capability I haven't ever been in a spot where I needed IP network and didn't have it - not even on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens. Not in an elevator with a CIO or CEO. Not in a conference room with Fortune 500 reps. Not in the regular course of business. Maybe now and then on vacation it might occur, but then the phone is turned off so I wouldn't even know.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: "slinging tin" is a trade term.
For VMHosts for customers who need that, yeah. Obviously that's not for small business or bare metal servers.
Every solution available has advantages and disadvantages.
So you're saying that fragmentation is an Android advantage.
I don't know if you've heard, but Linux/Android PC's are moving 1.5 million units per day, with a half-billion unit installed base. At the current rate of growth Linux PCs will exceed Earth's human population in Q3 2014.
Not sure I followed that entirely, but I (too?) would like a like a link to some Public Domain Blender 3d models. And yes, this is off topic.
Yes, this is far more abuse than is typical for /., but it's the Friday leading into a three day weekend in the US - Veterans Day - so many of us may be more drunk than usual.
All of the basic hypervisors are free, basically because kvm is free and included in Linux and the rest of them don't want to die.
The expensive parts are the management suites, advanced feature enablement, and support, none of which you need to get grounded in VM basics.
Hypervisor overhead has not really been a problem for five years or so. Baseline host tin these days is 24 threads/12 cores, 192 GB RAM, Dual port 10Gbe and dual 8Gbps FC or dual 10Gbps FCOE, and some SSD backed storage. It's the cost of that storage bandwidth that is holding things up now, and less so the network bandwidth - not CPU and RAM.
The surplus gear I use for test/dev is a few old boxes with dual X5550's and 96GB and quad gigabit. It sounds like you're trying to make do with some ancient P4 Desktops. You may want to look at the recent AMD desktop chips instead. You can get 8 modern cores, 24GB RAM, and enough SSD to do test/dev for under $600. That would probably be more temporally relevant and informative without blowing your budget. You're not going to learn a lot about modern server hypervisors on desktop gear from ten years ago.
Sometimes a smart person will ask a simple question, not because he needs the answer but because he feels the discussion will be instructive to others, or yield useful new insight. /. being a herd of nerd there will be many and apposite solutions and viewpoints offered. This is a legitimate Ask Slashdot question and should come up every year.
Having praised the question I probably should give an answer: "yes".
And since I've been accused of being cryptically terse here recently I should expand on that. All the major virtual machine platforms are free. A learner who wants to understand the relative merits can and should try them all, read, ask and participate in online discussions about them. Learn about the numerous available virtual appliances free and commercial as well. In the current environment VM proficiency is a basic systems admin requirement.
Schooling you is not my job. People pay good money for that service, or they learn their lessons the long, slow, expensive hard way like the rest of us did.
Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
Nope. When the bad guys have got root on your PC the only way to restore confidence in it is to rebuild it from a trusted image. Likewise if your network admin has gone untrusted on your infrastructure you burn it down and build it new again. Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Frankly that's not near enough to stop a real determined jerk with skills, but thankfully we are rare. Don't hire us in the first place if you can avoid it.
It is not that hard to set up a service on a Windows server that provides backdoor services. If you have domain admin rights tunnelling rdp or somesuch through it is trivial. They can use outbound polling of http or dns or even ntp to violate your firewall. You can give the service rights of some other person like the cio for example. Those guys usually demand the keys to the harem. From there you can remote to any server or desktop, do literally anything. These tools are readily available and open source, and every serious enterprise IT pro should have and understand them because often your first job is locking out the last guy.
Um, no.
My point is this: STEAM on any platform is not an instant massive games library. Some people seem to believe it is.
Fine. I don't crave a massive games library. But when they bring Steam to me, I gained some cool games I didn't have for my platform. Kind of like when Windows Phone users were glad to finally get Angry Birds and Words With Friends long after they were passe.
Like those Windows Phone users I wasn't ever going to shift my platform to go to the developer so it is nice he is coming to me. It's doubtful I will actually play many of these games for very long anyway. No time for games.
It is very rare that I connect my tablet to anything but the WiFi at work and home, the hotel, store or restaurant that provides free WiFi. On the go I just use the phone. Sometimes I just whichever is closer to hand like now on my phone, over home WiFi. But I do have the phone, and if I want to share something with somebody else, the 10" tablet is a more considerate format, so it's nice to be able to tether. It's easier on the eyes for tech manuals and such too. WiFi 4g tether is awesome.
V!gara. They can sell it by email.
They only lost one bladelet every 400 years. Maybe they could help me find my car keys.
In our own solar system we have entire moons made entirely of hydrocarbons. No need to go to another star for that.
Tidal forces would cause an Earth-sized moon to cool more slowly, improving stratification of the molten iron core. This improves the strength of the moon's magnetosphere. Radiation is probably fine.
A planet like that almost certainly has a moon of the correct size and composition. When we get to the stars we will find that almost all have homes for Men.
Well since I'm a Linux geek who never, ever ran Windows on his desktop this is no loss.
To me receiving an Office document is akin to sucking a sip out of a sewer.
Microsoft is wandering in every direction now. They are lost. "Where is mommy?"
I'm not getting the nerdfest invites any more and for once I'm able to attend. I might be able to bring a nice drinkable treble boch. Please gmail me an invite.
You're beyond clueless on the subject, because in addition to being ignorant of the issue at hand, you're also assuming the "neighborly relations" talk about person to person relationships
I was a white kid born in 1965 who grew up in the area commonly known as "Watts". Torrance is what we call that spot now. Not only am I not ignorant, I have considerable personal experience of the evolution and practice of civil rights in that area, and the reaction of the populace thereto. You are basing your social activism on your idealistic interpretation of what happened there. I was there, and know from personal experience what happened there. Don't you dare presume to school me.
I have acquired three Windows cloud desktops through services like OnLive. Through Citrix and VMWare View I have access to an unlimited number of desktops with this tablet. [...] My phone has LTE and hotspot
Can you use these desktops while you have zero bars? I can use my 10" laptop while riding the city bus without needing to spend hundreds of dollars per year on a cellular data plan. How much do you pay the telco per month for a cellular plan that includes "LTE and hotspot", and how much more rent do you pay per month to live in a major city that has LTE compared to a smaller city that lacks it? And what do you do when you run out of LTE data allowance for the month?
My tablet has the dock, so I can attach Wacom tablets, keyboards, mice, trackballs, and even Microsoft's Kinect if I want to.
Keyboards, mice, and trackballs I'll grant because those devices use class drivers that I know are in Android. But I wasn't aware that tablets came with drivers for Wacom tablets or Kinect sensors. Even the driver for USB flash drives requires rooting on a Nexus 7, and I was under the impression that things like Netflix would refuse to run on rooted devices.
Nobody in their right mind would pay more for a Surface intending to defang the prevention of choice implicit in it when they could just buy a Nexus 10
Unless they don't want to have to buy, carry, keep charged, and buy data plans for both a Surface to run Windows RT-exclusive applications and a Nexus 10 to run Android-exclusive applications.
I'm a metro critter I guess. Since I got this SGS3 phone with 3G, 4GE and hotspot capability I haven't ever been in a spot where I needed IP network and didn't have it - not even on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens. Not in an elevator with a CIO or CEO. Not in a conference room with Fortune 500 reps. Not in the regular course of business. Maybe now and then on vacation it might occur, but then the phone is turned off so I wouldn't even know.