Matthew, I believe MONO has already been ported to the s390x
environment, courtesy of Neal Ferguson at SNA.
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:S390
Matthew Donald wrote:
SUSE linux would work fine in this sort of environment, but it would
need to have the desktop customised considerably to remove any 'single
user' gadgets and the like. As noted above there may be issues getting
Evolution on S390x. Also, Evolution and the Ximian desktop are coded in
Mono, which give you memory issues similar to Java.
Didn't Evolution used to be open source? Did Novell make it closed
source when they took over Ximian? If it's open source, then it should
be possible to get someone to port Mono (which is open source) and
Evolution (which is written in Mono) to S390x. That's the advantage of
open source.
Matthew
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:13 AM, Ward, Mike S <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Wow it does give me food for thought. Sounds like you’re well versed
in these types of environments. Another question if you don’t mind.
In this environment would SUSE linux work? And would they be able to
use Ximian and Evolution to connect to an exchange server for
email/calendar and those type of office functions?
*From:* The IBM z/VM Operating System
[mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>]
*On Behalf Of *Matthew Donald
*Sent:* Wednesday, May 13, 2009 2:07 PM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: Virtualized Desktop
Firstly, you need to know the expected environment before you can
work out anything. Lets assume that you want to provide Firefox for
browsing, Lotus Notes for email, Symphony for office and x3270 for
mainframe access. All of these run under Linux and, in addition,
Notes and Symphony are Eclipse-based which means JVM's.
What I /wouldn't/ do is give each user a separate Linux guest. I'd
probably look at around 4 Linux guests. These guest would have all
1000 users logged onto them.
One guest would provide the desktop. That is, every user would log
onto a single guest using X-Windows and maybe Gnome (but I'd look at
Enlightenment as it has a lower memory footprint). The desktop
would have icons for Notes, Symphony etc. Clicking an icon would run
a remote app on one of the other guests. Any user running Firefox
or x3270 would run the app on this guest.
A second guest would run Notes. Every time a user clicked the Notes
icon, it would start it would start the Notes app on the second guest.
The third and fourth guests would have Symphony workload spread
between them. When a user clicked the Symphony icon, half would run
the app on the third guest and half on the fourth guest.
Essentially, the model is to have the basic desktop and the non-java
apps on one guest and the java workload spread over the other three
guests.
I know a config along these lines would work, since the State of
Florida did something like this in the late-90's. They were using
four 8-way Intel P3 boxes running Linux with Netscape, Wordperfect
and Quattro. I'm pretty sure they were supporting more than 1000 users.
As to resources, I don't know of any benchmarks, so the following is
based on my experience with z/VM +z/Linux + Websphere. My gut feel
is that you could probably run this sort of workload with 4 IFL's
and somewhere between 96G and 128G, depending on the number of
simultaneous users. I may be over-estimating the CPU workload.
Most of the memory requirement would be for JVM's. I'd allow
somewhere between 128M and 256M per JVM. So long as the GC was
running no more frequently than every 8 seconds or so and each GC
run was freeing at least 30% of the heap on each run then the sizing
would be adequate.
Another problem you are likely to hit is in networking. The
X-Windows protocol has outbound connections from the Linux guest to
the terminal. I don't know about your environment, but many site
use VPN's internally with each group being restricted to a single
VPN sandbox. The problem is that many VPN clients (such as
Aventail) only allow connections from the terminal to the server,
and not the other way around.
Hope this gives you food for thought
Matthew Donald
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 7:30 AM, Ward, Mike S <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello, all. I have a question. It seems that we are looking into a
virtualized desktop environment (Single Image) on our distributed side.
I kind of laugh at this because that's where we came from with VM and an
OS running under VM (Green Screen) long ago and now it's making full
circle. In VM how do you determine the amount of hardware MIPS, Disk,
Etc... for let's say 1000 users? Is there any kind of formula to go by?
I know in the distributed environment, it will probably take a lot of
disk space, and as far as performance I don't think it would be as
snappy as a real VM system. I used to work at a shop where we had 2500
users and a few with APL, that's right APL. Anyone that's been around
knows what APL programmers did for VM. And in that shop response time
was good even under MVS/CICS under VM. Anyway any comments, suggestions,
criticisms are welcome.
Thanks.
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