Well, we're only really experimenting with it here. This is an actual production box, so we're not going to play around seeing how many Linuxes we can get going. The biggest problem I could see is that it had a poor response time for CPU intensive tasks. While a 'bonnie' to do a byte-by-byte write would be mean to a normal machine, it was brutally slow on the S/390. For example, we have Linux in an LPAR w/ 1024MB of memory. This LPAR resided on a 6 CPU 1,271 MIPS partition w/ 18GB of memory. When doing normal "stuff", like code compiling, etc - it really was just about as fast as the PII-400 sitting on my desk. This is all subjective, of course. - Nick Reinking chrome at real-time.com, on 04/05/2001 02:34:09 PM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org @ PMDF cc: Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Z-Series thread > According to the 390 presentation, the sales guy made it sound like the 1mil > dollar box was able to support the 4000 instances. Bob, you know better than to take figures like that as being firm. :) FWIW; I think as long as people aren't doing ecommerce; 4000 virtual machines on a single $1M machine isn't unreasonable. Especially once the kernel gets a better scheduler for running as a VM, and isn't wasting processor interrupts just checking to see if there's anything to do. But like Nick said; if people are doing heavy dbase stuff, it'll hurt a bit more. the fact that figures vary so wildly from source to source; shows just how little *anyone* knows about running large numbers of virtual machines. I don't think there's more than a handful of people who really have much experience at this. Nick, how many virtual machines are you running, and under what load? what's your experience with their responsiveness? (mind you, I realize that what you're doing is radically different from what we're proposing here. you probably have a few machines at high load; whereas we're talking about many machines at low load). > For what? The presenter made it sound like if you just bought VM and the Linux > VM stuff that was it for cost. They have special pricing for Linux instances. hardware support. you don't buy a Cisco router without support; nor a Sun E4500. same difference here. :) > As I said before. Pipe dream. I have not done any pricing models yet. And of > course, I was just going on what the sales guy presented, which is always going > to be rosey colored. I spent about a year smoking that same pipe. I guess I finally rubbed off enough on Bob. :) Carl Soderstrom. -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700 _______________________________________________ tclug-list mailing list tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list