Except that mainframes never had a place in small to medium business. An assemblage of commodity hardware has a major advantage over the big iron: it's scalable from a single x86 server up. Also, you aren't tied to any hardware vendor for all of those commodity pieces. These are the reasons why hardly anybody uses mainframes anymore.
Yeah, VI3 is the start of something huge. It decouples hardware from OS almost completely -- and that has major implications in datacenter management. It's like the physical infrastructure is now just a blob of CPU, RAM, and disk space, and you can add or subtract hardware to that blob without disrupting your operations at all. Even the most jaded geek has to see how cool that is.
I manage 100s of VMs with VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure, and I call bullshit on your whole post my good man.
"Actual state of management software is... poor. On other side, the people who have developed their own management for cheap (e.g. blade) hosts farms - feel least urge to switch to VMs from real hosts. For well managed environment with redundant hardware it is really waste to burn CPU cycles of emulation. (*)"
The actual state of the management software is excellent. Have you used Virtual Center 3? Care to elaborate with your details? I can: it's easy to organize a huge farm of VM's, prioritize them based on their CPU and RAM needs, move VMs from one physical host to another on the fly, generate alerts on nearly anything and customize actions based on those alerts, on and on. There is only one thing I don't like so far about VC/VI, and that is how LUNs on the ESX hosts are managed.
"VMs solve no particular problem, but just propagate problem of poor OS management to another level - hardware/emulated hardware."
It solves two problems off the top of my head: hardware proliferation, and hardware failure.
We have a glut of CPU speed and RAM space, but the chasses surrounding those chips are still expensive. Not just expensive in terms of the box itself, but in the cost of powering and cooling the server as well as the spacial cost of having it in the rack. The solution is to have one physical server do more than one job. The way to do that safely and sanely is to virtualize.
Another major problem VMs solve is hardware failure. Right now, in my own virtual datacenter, I pretty much don't care about anything less than a whole blade going down. If there is a single blip in the hardware, Virtual Infrastructure migrates the VMs off of the faulty hardware automatically, *without interrupting the VMs*. In other words, for 99% of all hardware failures, my VMs keep running and I can swap out the bad physical server without disturbing anything. Zero downtime. I still cluster at the OS level, too, so in reality I am only worried about my whole datacenter being nuked. Similarly, I don't care too much about hardware replacement cycles anymore either. When a warranty expires, I push all the VMs off of the box and unrack it. We unpack the replacement box, rack it & install ESX, and that's it. The Virtual Center will automatically shuffle VMs onto the new hardware.
"In the end, when box is plain hardware you can always pull the plug. Try to emulate that with compromised/erroneous VM which started hogging all system resources from other VMs - and management interface too."
Hehe. 'You try to open the door, but *there's too much blood on the knob!*' You are defining an extremely specific problem and treating it like it's a general issue with virtualization, but I will play along.
Here is what would happen in my environment. First the VC would automatically migrate all of the other VMs away from the crazy VM. Once the crazy VM was isolated, I could pull the plug on the box if I felt like that was my only option. Then I would activate a clone of the VM (I clone every freshly minted server and put the clone on ice--try doing that with nothing but "OS management"), restore data from backup if necessary, and away we go on an fresh, uncompromised server. Meanwhile I can go back and examine the crazy VM at my leisure and have it completely sandboxed.
The state of the art in virtualization is not a single server running a few linux instances, sir. Check out where VMWare (and probably Microsoft) is heading and you will see that things are rapidly evolving. I'm talking a quantum leap in datacenter management here, the biggest thing since commodity hardware.
Somewhere in the dank basement levels far below Darl McBride's office, SCO's only remaining systems engineer is laughing wildly. They actually went with "SCAMP"! The fools!
Actually, the US is fairly unique among the first world nations because we're NOT suffering the population implosion. Immigration is giving us the people we need. Unless we cave in to the xenophobes and seal our borders, we'll be fine. Well, after we deal with the huge anomaly of the Baby Boomer generation.
Okay, so when your users get themselves infected with Sober.WXYZ and start spamming the world, are you blacklisted everywhere?
Or how about this: you send me an email at jerkwad@big-isp.com. I decide to be a jerkwad, so I report your email as spam. Now your mail server is blacklisted for my whole ISP?
Isn't your system merely shifting the work load from spam fighting to blacklist fighting?
Considering that the ICFP's focus is on functional programming and not the daily tribulations of the real-world programmer, I think their competitions are just fine.
It's not that simple. You have to strike a balance between keeping your client happy (the company who outsourced their tech support to you) and keeping the call length down. The QA department listens to random phone calls for this reason.
I was lousy at this, because I like to solve problems. But I saw plenty of guys get promoted for playing the numbers game.
Is that the "fssseeeeWHOOSH" sound that is in practically every sci-fi movie and TV show? I don't remember DOOM very well, but if it's the sound I'm thinking of then it originally came from a vacuum cleaner commercial decades ago.
My favorite political game on the C=64 was SSI's President Elect. It was a good simulation of the hard-nosed strategic side of the presidential race. It also taught me that you're all damn lucky that I'm not running for president!
There was also an early DOS game about U.S./Middle East politics that held my attention for a while. I don't remember the name, but I remember that my efforts usual (and not always accidentally) resulted in nuclear war. Ahhh, good times.
And Tropico is a great recent political game. People are often fooled into thinking it's a cheap SimCity builder, but if you crank up the political difficulty to where it should be, it's an interesting game of fighting to stay in power.
I wouldn't call 300k shares per day astronomical volume. RedHat averages 10x the volume, 20x for IBM. SCOX is a glorified penny stock.
Re:Darl gets his ass kicked.
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"Hello, this is Mr. McBride's office. Mr. McBride will fight you, but first he asks that you kick your own ass, in order to prove that Mr. McBride can kick you ass. After that, we'll schedule a time for Mr. McBride to kick your ass sometime in the year 2035."
More important than "Can it be done?" is the question, "Will it be any different from what nature already does?"
Nature may be a blind watchmaker, but she's had 4 billion years to evolve near-optimal solutions to the problems of assembling matter at the nano scale. I'd like to see nanotechnology provide new, optimal solutions, but I won't hold my breath. For now, my bet is that nanotechnology will wake up one day and realize that it is a subset of bioengineering.
"If you guys would just let them slowly drain their money trying to pay lawyers to face off against blue chip companies like IBM, they'd slowly die off. But by giving them attention, they can stay alive. "
I disagree. If Slashdot and other sites weren't openly critical of SCO, there would still be a number of 'analysts' like Rob Enderle who continue to spin SCO's BS into gold.
This issue won't die as long as Microsoft and Sun are paying millions of dollars for...um..."licenses."
Just how much did you want that cancer-eating virus ? Given how often virii mutate ?
I'm no more scared of how an artificial virus can mutate than I am of how a natural virus mutates. It's extremely unlikely that any mutation will make a virus more deadly. Most mutations just break the little machine.
Also, I doubt an artifical virus has a higher chance of becoming an Evil Plague Virus than any of the kazillion non-pathological virii that are floating around us every day. We're swimming in the little critters all the time, and our immune systems can handle almost every of those rare, evil mutations.
Bring on the cancer eaters, I say.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that mainframes never had a place in small to medium business. An assemblage of commodity hardware has a major advantage over the big iron: it's scalable from a single x86 server up. Also, you aren't tied to any hardware vendor for all of those commodity pieces. These are the reasons why hardly anybody uses mainframes anymore.
Yeah, VI3 is the start of something huge. It decouples hardware from OS almost completely -- and that has major implications in datacenter management. It's like the physical infrastructure is now just a blob of CPU, RAM, and disk space, and you can add or subtract hardware to that blob without disrupting your operations at all. Even the most jaded geek has to see how cool that is.
I manage 100s of VMs with VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure, and I call bullshit on your whole post my good man.
... poor. On other side, the people who have developed their own management for cheap (e.g. blade) hosts farms - feel least urge to switch to VMs from real hosts. For well managed environment with redundant hardware it is really waste to burn CPU cycles of emulation. (*)"
"Actual state of management software is
The actual state of the management software is excellent. Have you used Virtual Center 3? Care to elaborate with your details? I can: it's easy to organize a huge farm of VM's, prioritize them based on their CPU and RAM needs, move VMs from one physical host to another on the fly, generate alerts on nearly anything and customize actions based on those alerts, on and on. There is only one thing I don't like so far about VC/VI, and that is how LUNs on the ESX hosts are managed.
"VMs solve no particular problem, but just propagate problem of poor OS management to another level - hardware/emulated hardware."
It solves two problems off the top of my head: hardware proliferation, and hardware failure.
We have a glut of CPU speed and RAM space, but the chasses surrounding those chips are still expensive. Not just expensive in terms of the box itself, but in the cost of powering and cooling the server as well as the spacial cost of having it in the rack. The solution is to have one physical server do more than one job. The way to do that safely and sanely is to virtualize.
Another major problem VMs solve is hardware failure. Right now, in my own virtual datacenter, I pretty much don't care about anything less than a whole blade going down. If there is a single blip in the hardware, Virtual Infrastructure migrates the VMs off of the faulty hardware automatically, *without interrupting the VMs*. In other words, for 99% of all hardware failures, my VMs keep running and I can swap out the bad physical server without disturbing anything. Zero downtime. I still cluster at the OS level, too, so in reality I am only worried about my whole datacenter being nuked. Similarly, I don't care too much about hardware replacement cycles anymore either. When a warranty expires, I push all the VMs off of the box and unrack it. We unpack the replacement box, rack it & install ESX, and that's it. The Virtual Center will automatically shuffle VMs onto the new hardware.
"In the end, when box is plain hardware you can always pull the plug. Try to emulate that with compromised/erroneous VM which started hogging all system resources from other VMs - and management interface too."
Hehe. 'You try to open the door, but *there's too much blood on the knob!*' You are defining an extremely specific problem and treating it like it's a general issue with virtualization, but I will play along.
Here is what would happen in my environment. First the VC would automatically migrate all of the other VMs away from the crazy VM. Once the crazy VM was isolated, I could pull the plug on the box if I felt like that was my only option. Then I would activate a clone of the VM (I clone every freshly minted server and put the clone on ice--try doing that with nothing but "OS management"), restore data from backup if necessary, and away we go on an fresh, uncompromised server. Meanwhile I can go back and examine the crazy VM at my leisure and have it completely sandboxed.
The state of the art in virtualization is not a single server running a few linux instances, sir. Check out where VMWare (and probably Microsoft) is heading and you will see that things are rapidly evolving. I'm talking a quantum leap in datacenter management here, the biggest thing since commodity hardware.
Somewhere in the dank basement levels far below Darl McBride's office, SCO's only remaining systems engineer is laughing wildly. They actually went with "SCAMP"! The fools!
Here's my guess at how they came up with 90PB for Data:
Take the low estimate for the number of synapses in the human brain, 100 trillion.
Assume each synapse requires 1MB of storage to capture its functions and state information. (Yeah, I think this is a lowball estimate.)
What you get is almost exactly 90PB of storage for 100 trillion synapses.
Does Bell Labs count?
He didn't say BSD prevents it. He's saying the GPL guarantees it.
I'm miffed that he didn't express it in stone-furlongs.
Not sure why you got marked as a Troll. We're using Trend Micro on our Exchange server and ClamAV on our MXes...and I've noticed the exact same thing.
ClamAV's response times are great. Since October 2004, they have beaten Trend Micro every single time.
Actually, the US is fairly unique among the first world nations because we're NOT suffering the population implosion. Immigration is giving us the people we need. Unless we cave in to the xenophobes and seal our borders, we'll be fine. Well, after we deal with the huge anomaly of the Baby Boomer generation.
Okay, so when your users get themselves infected with Sober.WXYZ and start spamming the world, are you blacklisted everywhere?
Or how about this: you send me an email at jerkwad@big-isp.com. I decide to be a jerkwad, so I report your email as spam. Now your mail server is blacklisted for my whole ISP?
Isn't your system merely shifting the work load from spam fighting to blacklist fighting?
Bah, humbug!
Considering that the ICFP's focus is on functional programming and not the daily tribulations of the real-world programmer, I think their competitions are just fine.
FORthon -- it combines the fun and practicality of Python with the idiosyncrasies of FORTRAN 77.
Integers must begin with I,J,K,L,M,N.
I'm officially declaring pre-alpha as of this post.
It's not that simple. You have to strike a balance between keeping your client happy (the company who outsourced their tech support to you) and keeping the call length down. The QA department listens to random phone calls for this reason.
I was lousy at this, because I like to solve problems. But I saw plenty of guys get promoted for playing the numbers game.
Is that the "fssseeeeWHOOSH" sound that is in practically every sci-fi movie and TV show? I don't remember DOOM very well, but if it's the sound I'm thinking of then it originally came from a vacuum cleaner commercial decades ago.
My favorite political game on the C=64 was SSI's President Elect. It was a good simulation of the hard-nosed strategic side of the presidential race. It also taught me that you're all damn lucky that I'm not running for president!
There was also an early DOS game about U.S./Middle East politics that held my attention for a while. I don't remember the name, but I remember that my efforts usual (and not always accidentally) resulted in nuclear war. Ahhh, good times.
And Tropico is a great recent political game. People are often fooled into thinking it's a cheap SimCity builder, but if you crank up the political difficulty to where it should be, it's an interesting game of fighting to stay in power.
I wouldn't call 300k shares per day astronomical volume. RedHat averages 10x the volume, 20x for IBM. SCOX is a glorified penny stock.
"Hello, this is Mr. McBride's office. Mr. McBride will fight you, but first he asks that you kick your own ass, in order to prove that Mr. McBride can kick you ass. After that, we'll schedule a time for Mr. McBride to kick your ass sometime in the year 2035."
More important than "Can it be done?" is the question, "Will it be any different from what nature already does?"
Nature may be a blind watchmaker, but she's had 4 billion years to evolve near-optimal solutions to the problems of assembling matter at the nano scale. I'd like to see nanotechnology provide new, optimal solutions, but I won't hold my breath. For now, my bet is that nanotechnology will wake up one day and realize that it is a subset of bioengineering.
"If you guys would just let them slowly drain their money trying to pay lawyers to face off against blue chip companies like IBM, they'd slowly die off. But by giving them attention, they can stay alive. "
I disagree. If Slashdot and other sites weren't openly critical of SCO, there would still be a number of 'analysts' like Rob Enderle who continue to spin SCO's BS into gold.
This issue won't die as long as Microsoft and Sun are paying millions of dollars for...um..."licenses."
Just how much did you want that cancer-eating virus ? Given how often virii mutate ?
I'm no more scared of how an artificial virus can mutate than I am of how a natural virus mutates. It's extremely unlikely that any mutation will make a virus more deadly. Most mutations just break the little machine.
Also, I doubt an artifical virus has a higher chance of becoming an Evil Plague Virus than any of the kazillion non-pathological virii that are floating around us every day. We're swimming in the little critters all the time, and our immune systems can handle almost every of those rare, evil mutations. Bring on the cancer eaters, I say.
Sure thing. $5,000/year salary, it is! Do you like your dogfood crunchy or the kind the makes its own gravy?
I look forward to the day when economists are offshored. We'll see how the free market ideologues hold up, then.