On May 6, 2010, at 5:20 PM, Michael Jinks wrote:
Is there a VM server that will deply on SPARC hardware and pretend
to be
an x86?
Qemu will do it, but it'll be slower than pissing tar.
I knew Qemu could emulate a SPARC, wasn't sure about the chips it
could run on. But, yeah, I'd expect it to be about like pissing tar.
Yeah. Doesn't sound like an option. Virtualization is one thing,
but wholesale emulation of the entire processor, memory, and I/O
architecture is a different animal entirely.
I've only tried Sun Ray on one VM platform, a Solaris/x86 guest on
VMware
ESX; performance was so bad we abandoned the attempt.
I've done two installations of exactly that, with great results,
indistinguishable from running on bare metal if VMware is properly
configured. (i.e., no overcommitment of CPUs or memory) WTF?
This was several months ago so my memory of numeric details is
gone, but
there's no way our users would have suffered through it. Logins took
minutes, screen draws were unusably slow; this while other VMs on the
same hardware were nicely fluid for other sorts of workloads. *shrug*
Wow...Something was definitely wrong here. Here's a real data
point for your reference. At a client site right now, I have an HP/
Compaq ML530, dual 3GHz Xeons with 8GB of RAM and hardware-mirrored &
cached 15K RPM SCSI disks running ESXi v3.5. It currently hosts
three VMs: one running an instance of SCO OpenServer (definitely
"legacy") to run one specific, very lightweight app, one Ubuntu 9.10
Server for external services, and one Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop. The
latter is currently handling three Sun Rays, about to turn into
five. There's a 1Gbps pipe to the switch and 100MBps fully-switched
drops to each DTU. Logins take 5-10 seconds (Gnome is a big
lumbering pig) and performance is snappy. The usage pattern is
normal "office" activity: Email with Thunderbird, occasional web
browser use with Firefox, spreadsheets/word processing with
OpenOffice 3.1.1, and sshing over to the SCO instance in an xterm.
It's overcommitted 3:2 with CPUs, but the SCO VM gets very little
CPU time. It's not overcommitted on RAM, though.
Maybe it's worth another go, but we don't have anything new for VM
hosting hardware since the last try, and nothing in the network space
where this deployment has to go so it'd be moot anyway.
:-(
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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