Comments on: VMWare and Spring

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:07:05 +0000

The acquisition of Spring Source is awesome actually. Spring has been pushing the envelope with OSGi and Dynamic Discovery of services. Virtualization has little to do with developers wanting to use different desktop environments and everything to do with Cloud computing.

AIX virtualization is cheaper once you have bit the bullet and invested in the hardware, but overall it isn’t near as cheap as a license for VM Ware server and individual OS licenses on intel hardware.

By: Tommy Knowlton

Tommy Knowlton — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:55:59 +0000

Last year at Mountain West Ruby Conference, I saw a demo of a Rails app that monitored the load on its asynchronous consumer (measuring queue length) and automatically fired off additional EC2 (Amazon) instances – which also monitored queue length, and shut themselves down when the queue length was consistently low. Very interesting technique – but more interesting to me is how hosting in the cloud creates options for the software designer that have no analog in the physical datacenter. I will be very interested to see how this evolves, especially with an eye toward security.

By: Neal Harris

Neal Harris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:17:03 +0000

“Will we see the same behavior we have seen from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and others? Will we be held hostage by exorbitant maintenance fees? Will “optional, but really required” add-on prices go through the roof. Will service levels decline in non-contract years?”

Are you seeing any of these same tendencies from cisco or the h/w side? Given the commoditization at the edge and new data center architectures (converged ethernet, etc.), would it make sense for you to personally maintain a relationship with cisco’s primary competitors in LAN and SAN networking (HP, Brocade, F5, etc.)? BYU is willing to take on tough competition to see how well they compete (Oklahoma on Saturday); is the church consistently ensuring that cisco does the same?

By: Doug Perkes

Doug Perkes — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:05:25 +0000

Interesting take on virtualization. I’m a developer myself, but the notion of moving virtual machines from Dev to Test to QA to Prod really scares me. I’ve seen what other developers and I do to virtual machines to get our code to work and it is pretty scary. I’m all for moving installation packages, scripts, etc between environments but I personally don’t want my virtual machines ever running a production system.

[Switching Gears] One interesting feature I’ve seen with Microsoft Hyper-V in Server 2008 R2 is Core Parking. It essentially shuts down CPU cores when they are being used resulting in potential cost savings for electricity. I’m not sure if the other vendors support it, but it is an interesting feature.

By: queuno

queuno — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:32:58 +0000

VMware owns 0% of the AIX virtualization market.

We need to stop thinking of it as a “virtualization” market, rather as a series of markets that serve different OS and server technologies.

JPD: Good point. And, in our experience, AIX is more cost effective per virtual server than VMWare.

By: Russell Rollins

Russell Rollins — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:26:01 +0000

Some good points, Joel. Thanks for the post. Been using ESX for a couple years now (think we have three or four instances of it) and looking forward to trying out CloudFoundry.

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:56:34 +0000

I personally use VirtualBox from Sun – there’s an Open Source Edition too. http://www.virtualbox.org … if running Ubuntu, just “apt-get install virtualbox-ose”