If you follow that link I provided above there you can see that I also tested a couple of Xen solutions and the that the best results was achieved using (XenSource/Citrix) XenServer.
Lars
The statement "directly under VMware (no other OS required)" is utterly wrong and their marketing leads you to get this wrong. BEA has written their own OS that supports the limited set of hw devices that exists under VMware. They've named this OS Bare Metal, and they now market this with that you now can run your Java apps on bare metal under vmware esx. Sure.
ESX can't be installed in BEA's [url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bare+met al+java]Bare Metal[/url] operating system or any other OS;)
ESX does however provide a kernel that is written from scratch to support virtualization. This removes much of the overhead you see with "normal" operating systems, but it also limits the amount of drivers available. As this kernel does not have a user interface, ESX also ship with a virtual machine based on redhat that has extended access to administer the vmkernel.
Lars
Finally. HP has had all their internal servers running Debian forever while they only supported the commercial distros SUSE, Redhat and Mandriva.
HP has also had coders inside the debian project and supporting it with coders and money. This has meant that debian has been a breeze to install on HP servers for quite a while.
My guess is that now that Ubuntu (server) is the upcoming OS that takes market shares from the previous mentioned ones, I guess HP has had some pressure from it's customers to bring in Ubuntu support. As each ubuntu release is basicly a snapshot of Debian Testing (with some additional tweaking and adjustments) HP has done a wize decision on taking the challenge at it's roots by first supporting Debian. I guess the next OS they will announce support for will be Ubuntu.
IBM has written a paper on this comparing two of their 1U 2 cpu servers, the e326 (AMD) and x336 (Xeon MP). The paper is named "Performance of Two-Way Opteron and Xeon Processor-Based Servers" from April 2005.
A search on ibm.com does not give me a link to the document and neither does google. I did however find an IBM provided AMD vs XEON linpack-comparison benchmark ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/benchmarks/wp_L inpack_072905.pdf, but first benchmark (that I can't locate) was better.
It clearly shows the advantages of the AMDs NUMA architecture and also other factors.
NUMA is also available on some enterprise level IBM XEON servers like the x440, x445 and x460 (or the equivelent systems from Fujitsu Siemens or NEC). One thing that is important on these servers is that you should balance each CEC with the same amount of memory or it will greatly affect performance. AMD's NUMA technology is not affected as much as XEON on this (as the mentioned paper shows).
Could these movies have been copied in China? I dunno. A friend of mine was in China some time ago and returned with a dozen of DVD movies.
It turned out that some of them had very bad sound quality and some had the sound out of synch with the picture. One also had chinese subtitles. I wouldn't reccomend wasting any money (no matter how few) on these copies.
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If you follow that link I provided above there you can see that I also tested a couple of Xen solutions and the that the best results was achieved using (XenSource/Citrix) XenServer. Lars
Critical servers are not typically virtualized because they get good performance or for consolidation reasons, but http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct9468.pdf because of http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/bct0107.pdf DR. Since storage IO is http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=15&start=275 slower inside a virtualized enviroment you will need to spend some more time to plan your storage environment and implement it right in order to get the expected performance even if it might a bit be more expensive.
Lars
Well, if you have the right hw, you can get it running on a physical box too. I've seen it run. :-)
The statement "directly under VMware (no other OS required)" is utterly wrong and their marketing leads you to get this wrong. BEA has written their own OS that supports the limited set of hw devices that exists under VMware. They've named this OS Bare Metal, and they now market this with that you now can run your Java apps on bare metal under vmware esx. Sure.
ESX can't be installed in BEA's [url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bare+met al+java]Bare Metal[/url] operating system or any other OS ;)
ESX does however provide a kernel that is written from scratch to support virtualization. This removes much of the overhead you see with "normal" operating systems, but it also limits the amount of drivers available. As this kernel does not have a user interface, ESX also ship with a virtual machine based on redhat that has extended access to administer the vmkernel.
Lars
Finally. HP has had all their internal servers running Debian forever while they only supported the commercial distros SUSE, Redhat and Mandriva.
HP has also had coders inside the debian project and supporting it with coders and money. This has meant that debian has been a breeze to install on HP servers for quite a while.
My guess is that now that Ubuntu (server) is the upcoming OS that takes market shares from the previous mentioned ones, I guess HP has had some pressure from it's customers to bring in Ubuntu support. As each ubuntu release is basicly a snapshot of Debian Testing (with some additional tweaking and adjustments) HP has done a wize decision on taking the challenge at it's roots by first supporting Debian. I guess the next OS they will announce support for will be Ubuntu.
L
A search on ibm.com does not give me a link to the document and neither does google. I did however find an IBM provided AMD vs XEON linpack-comparison benchmark ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/benchmarks/wp_L inpack_072905.pdf, but first benchmark (that I can't locate) was better.
It clearly shows the advantages of the AMDs NUMA architecture and also other factors.
NUMA is also available on some enterprise level IBM XEON servers like the x440, x445 and x460 (or the equivelent systems from Fujitsu Siemens or NEC). One thing that is important on these servers is that you should balance each CEC with the same amount of memory or it will greatly affect performance. AMD's NUMA technology is not affected as much as XEON on this (as the mentioned paper shows).
I don't think KiSS can release their code without violating a NDA from Sigma Designs as they are using Sigma's mpeg4 chip for divx playback.
Also Sigma Designs have a history that forced them to release their source code because they were violating GPL.
Could these movies have been copied in China? I dunno. A friend of mine was in China some time ago and returned with a dozen of DVD movies. It turned out that some of them had very bad sound quality and some had the sound out of synch with the picture. One also had chinese subtitles. I wouldn't reccomend wasting any money (no matter how few) on these copies.