R P Herrold wrote: > On Sat, 2 Apr 2011, Kyle Gonzales wrote: > >>> to get the LVM up and running first. As floppy and CD drives are >>> increasingly a rarity on server grade hardware, this seems reasonable, >>> as accessing a rescue image 'across the wire' is fairly challenging, as >>> it is not often done by most admins >> >> I call BS on that. In fact, my previous email told you exactly how >> sysadmins do make a rescue environment easily available to their servers >> using the available hardware features. > > Call as you will -- I looked at data. Networked out of band recovery > (ILO and the like) are available only on about a third of the units in a > data cabinet I just inventoried. The rest of the servers use serial > consoles or do without. It may be that the design livecycle of server > hardware is three to five years, but older kit gets repurposed rather > than scrapped
I have had experience with using Dell DRAC cards in servers since 2003, but the feature has been available since 2001. HP iLo has been available since at least 2002, and has been standard in their enterprise servers since 2006. So these types of features have been available for nearly 10 years. > This disinterest in supporting older kit is also shown in Red Hat's move > to KVM and away from Xen based virtualization. If you do not have the > right hardware support, you'll not be running virtualization with the > new RHEL release -- no para-virt support any more. As such most laptops > also get 'cut out' from running VM's unless a third party product is > used (there is a packaging of Xen that conflicts with KVM, with but will > install and run just fine) Do older servers have the necessary processor extensions to use KVM? Probably not. However, let's keep in mind that AMD has released processors for the server and desktop space that support hardware assisted virtualization since 2006. Intel first released theirs in 2005. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization So older kit is 5+ year old systems. Alternatively you will run into issues with systems built with non-enterprise class processors/boards within the past 5 years. As for the laptops, the issue is usually with consumer laptops which either do not have processors with VT extensions or whose firmware does not allow it. Business grade laptops, like Thinkpads, do not generally have this issue. I believe even laptops from Linux friendly vendors like System76 make sure they are virtualization friendly. I had an IBM Thinkpad with a Core 2 Duo processor that contained virtualization extensions in 2007. Ran KVM without issue. That was 4 years ago. -- Kyle Gonzales [email protected] GPG Key #0x566B435B Read My Tech Blog: http://techiebloggiethingie.blogspot.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
