On 05/10/2007, Brandorr <brandorr at opensolaris.org> wrote: > On 10/5/07, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote: > > Dave Miner writes: > > > at which those customers tend to move in upgrading. An in-place switch > > > is theoretically possible in the same way that we do DSR (disk space > > > reallocation) in the current installer when you need to change slice > > > sizes. But our research indicates that most of the customers we're > > > talking about here don't actually bother doing upgrades, anyway, so I'm > > > not sure we'll do that work. > > > > Probably off-topic for this thread, but I would expect the upgrade > > experience to be an important topic during architectural review. > > Bring the research results. :-> > > Actually I've been thinking about some somewhat related virtualization > issues, so I'll split this off as a separate thread.. (Might be > somewhat off-topic, but I'm not sure where the correct place to raise > this would be). One of the big things about IBM mainframe > virtualization, is that they allow customers to run very older OSes in > VMs, and will still provide commercial support on Modern > HW/Hypervisor. > > VMWare is using the same pitch now, for clients that are running old > Windows 2000, Windows NT, Netware and other older x86 applications and > OSes. (Basically allowing them to continue to run on hardware that > isn't natively supported by the OS.) > > Currently, the main reason upgrade the OS, is because they upgrade the > Hardware and are forced to upgrade the OS. > > As LDOMs, and in particular Xen takes off, I see Sun facing a > challenge. If an OS currently meets all of a clients needs for a > particular application, and they can migrate it to a VM using a tool > similar to VMWare's P2Vtool (Physical to Virtual), thus allowing them > to run on modern hardware ad infinitum using virtualization, why > wouldn't they just keep migrating the VM to newer and newer versions > of HW/Hypervisor? (Especially if their ISVs continue to provide > support). I think, a non insignificant percentage of Sun's customer > base will want Sun to continue to support these "older" OSes. (And > there might actually be a market for an LDOM P2Vtool for older Sparc > OSes.)
I think that's where BrandZ probably comes in. If you read recent blog posts from Sun folks, they have a BrandZ container for Solaris 8 and maybe 9 in the works right now to allow folks to bundle up old Solaris 8 servers and run them in a zone.... -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
