Shane Nay writes:
> Well, as most of us know mod_perl doesn't really lend itself well to the
> "hosted" world because of the way it operates. However there is I think a
> conceivable solution. This might sound a little crazy (or a lot), but I've
> been messing around with vmware, and it's really cool/stable. One thought is
> instead of hosting a "site" or a "machine" host a "virtual machine". It might
> be more economical to use one of those IBM s/who knows how many machines that
> can run many many copies of linux internally for large hosts, but for a smaller
> hosting service they might want to give VMWare a shot. I have no personal
> connection with VMware, but it is a really cool product and I have been testing
> a lot of different things with it and it's VERY impressive.
I'm currently writing SILK (Simultaneous Instances of the Linux Kernel)
which is a combination of a tweaked Linux kernel hypervisor and a
tweaked Linux guest kernel. You can run multiple guest kernels under
the hypervisor and do the sort of basic stuff that VM/ESA (the IBM
S/390 product) and VMWare, with potential for fancier stuff if things
go nicely. I mentioned it on the linux-kernel and linux-390 mailing
lists so it's probably in archives somewhere. In a few months IBM
will be releasing a "run Linux kernels only" cut down version of VM
for free (or nearly so) for S/390 and IBM's targets definitely
include ISPs hosting lots of "virtual machines" on a nice reliable,
easily-adminned single large system. (Most of you have probably
seen various recent Linux/390 articles and the headline figure of
over 40000 concurrent Linux instances on one S/390, each running an
Apache daemon or similar). Cool stuff.
--Malcolm
--
Malcolm Beattie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Unix Systems Programmer
Oxford University Computing Services
