Re: RES: "Virtual Hosting"

[Robert McIntosh]

This brings up a feature that I really miss from the now missing 
Gemstone app server. It had the ability to cluster VMs on a single 
machine (as well as across a network), and allow an admin to partition 
an app across those VMs if needed. It would also cycle VMs on a 
schedule, start up VMs if a particular load threshold was achieved and 
shut down unneeded VMs. Although I am not an admin type, I took one of 
their admin classes and I saw the performance differences by allowing 
the server to add VMs as the client load increased.

I do not remember too many of the details as it was a few years ago, but 
each VM had a configuration specifiying heap size, shutdown schedule, 
etc. Maybe with modern VMs this isn't necessary anymore, but on big 
hardware, like the 16 CPU Solaris box we were using, it seemed a shame 
that if a single VM shutdown for whatever reason that that $250k server 
was now dead as an app server.

my .02 :-)
Robert
Craig Wohlfeil wrote:
I think this should be implemented within the VM as well. Imagine the 
overhead of having another copy of the server running for every 
application. I also think that you shouldn't have to have the server 
installed twice to run a separate VM. With a large server (with 
clustering support) it can more efficient to run 2/3 small VMs that 
have the same configuration than one large one.

Aaron Mulder wrote:
    However, I'm really suggesting we implement this within the VM,
whereas the above works by running multiple VMs.  If you want to run
multiple VMs, you can always just install the product twice.  I 
prefer to
also have the option to run apps sandboxed in the same VM.  Granted you
wouldn't be able to run different apps with different server components
(EJB/Web container, etc.) this way, but I think that's OK.

Aaron