On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, Charles Hutchinson wrote: > I'm not sure anyone is running vmware on "Big Iron" servers. It does not > run on mainframes and mini's. It runs on commodity Intel/AMD servers. It > happens that these "commodity" servers are getting larger but that has been > the case throughout the history of in PC. I run 6GB of ram on my personal > computer at home and make use of that ram on a regular basis as well as the > 4 cores in the box. 5 years ago the same computing horsepower was almost > exclusively in datacenter environments and more than likely would have fit > what I perceive as your definition of Big Iron.
the original poster was calling the 128G 8-core systems 'big iron' > Part of the savings comes from putting 15-30 virtual servers in the space > that you would fit 4 pizza box physical servers. You get even more density > by going to a blade environment for your virtual cluster. We are getting > several hundered "servers" per 8U of rack space. Once we have fully > populated our blade farm I expect to see a couple of thousand "servers in a > 16U pair of blade enclosures. this will work as long as your individual 'servers' don't have to do much. but don't mistake the capacity of your 'couple of thousand' servers for being the equivalent of more than a couple of dozen real servers. > Now the power and cooling are a little harder to quantify but at a 15 to 1 > ratio there is going to be a fair amount of savings on both cooling and > power even with the considerably larger server. > > If your strickly talking about 1% utilized servers you should see many more > than 15 guests on a 4x4core vmware server with 128GB+ of ram. which is even bigger than the 'big iron' the original poster was complaining about ;-) David Lang _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
