[Gllug] Xen - bit of a ramble

[Matthew Cooke]

>Agree..  I was going to suggest to anyone with the ability to
>implement this that it be possible to tell the real amount of
>committed RAM from some file in /proc, if this isn't obvious from
>"top".  But then I suppose someone would just come up with a patch
>to disable this..  :)
>
>I see Xen as far more useful for enterprises to consolidate, and
>this feature would be very useful there.
>
I read about server consolidation all the time in marketing literature but I 
don't really understand why you would do this with low end hardware.
When i was responsible for various bits of software running on various 
machines and they were fairly critical services I took every opportunity to 
make sure they weren't running on the same hardware.
It's easier to analyze performance bottlenecks, isolate problems and when a 
machine fails you don't lose half a dozen services at once.

When our company merged we had mail, DNS, file serving, firewalling and 
backups all running on different linux/novell servers. And we had 
partitioned our enterprise application to run on a cluster of x86 boxes.
The company that brought us had by comparison a windows office server 
running most of the office services plus some production related backup 
stuff. They lauged at how many servers we had.
Shortly after the merge it became apparent that their file sharing, domain 
resolution, IIS and SQL server they were running on their office server kept 
running really slowly and intermittently locking up. During the 
investigation of the cause we had to keep disabling things on the server 
causing critical services to become unavailable to the entire office.

I guess this is in danger of turning into a rant :) I can see why companies 
might consolidate onto some really high end Solaris system with hotswap and 
a sun engineer sleeping in the same rack but I fail to see why there would 
be any rush to consolidate enterprise services on to x86 boxes.

Then again perhaps you were thinking about linux running on high-end kit. 
That only just occured to me...

matt / eeyore


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