During an IBM presentation on z/890 and z/VSE given to our shop, they also presented VMWare. Ok, we're a bunch of mainframe types, and they spent 30 minutes on VMWare. Wrong market. A 5 minute presentation would have been sufficient for us.
However, the impression I got, was: VMWare is NOT VM..it is more like LPAR. You need XX MBs of ram for VMWare. If you are running something that needed 512MBs to run and you want to run 4 copies, then your real storage needed would be (512MB *4 + XX MBs). VMWare can do some paging at a significant impact to performance, so don't let it. VMWare seemed to be more akin to V=R with perferred guests. Dedicated scsi adapters, dedicated LAN cards, dedicated .... It was vary obvious that there wasn't a PC server that we had that had the resources on it to support VMWare. However, new servers might be a different story. Interesting concept. Might be a solution for some server consolidation. That is, small, underutilized ones. But I didn't see it as a real challenge to the mainframe server consolidation concept. From my perspective, once you start a serious attempt at server consolidation, putting all the consolidated servers on a single platform (mainframe) would give better management then some on the mainframe, others on VMWare, others on.... Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/11/04 02:30PM >>> I don't know that there's anything specifically comparing Linux on z/VM versus VMWare. VMWare is one of the virtualization tools IBM is recommending for their xSeries customers, so it has some merit to it. Perhaps your local zSeries sales rep will have some thoughts on why VMWare on Intel is not as good a choice as z/VM on zSeries hardware. :) >From my perspective, VMWare is not nearly as mature a technology as z/VM. It doesn't have anywhere near the system management and Linux-enabling features that z/VM does. The Intel platform is not nearly as rock solid as zSeries. If you price a full-blown Intel system with redundant everything, etc., etc., you're getting up into the 10's of thousands of dollars, even up to $50K. It only takes a few of those to add up to one mainframe. They'll knock your socks off on CPU-intensive workloads, of course, but if you have a lot of mainframe-resident data that needs to be accessed, having a Linux system on the same box and using HiperSockets is a nice setup for a number of reasons. Take a browse through the news articles and press releases at http://linuxvm.org/Info/l390link.html to get a feel for why other people have made the move, and see if any of it applies to your circumstances. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Seader, Cameron Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 10:50 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Linux Questions Greetings, Having troubles with promotion of Linux for zSeries in corporate environment. I'm Hopeing someone here can point me to some good documents on the strengths against an intel platform running VMWARE. There have been Questions come up about performance, Oracle, How many guests can we put out there and what kind of performance loss per guest do we get or can we expect? Just want to justify in spending a quarter of a million on the hardware and be able to get what we need out of it. Does anyone know of some good docs pointing to these answered questions. -Cameron ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
