On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:11:27 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Yeah. Although the fact that it takes a minute or two to start up makes
> me think it's spending time trying to find a free machine to run it on.
> Maybe each physical machine runs up to X virtual machines or something?

There are systems out there that allow dynamic reallocation of physical 
resources for virtual systems, so for example if you have 5 VMs running 
on a single physical box and the performance spikes on one of the VMs, 
the others can be dynamically moved to another physical system even while 
running.

Some of the features of large-scale virtualization farms are quite 
impressive these days in being able to do that.  "Workload management" is 
the term I hear our marketing folks (yeah, Novell has marketing folks!) 
use.

The server farm that we use for our practical exams currently doesn't do 
that, but I'm talking with the implementation team about how we could 
dynamically scale if we needed to, and there's a solution available from 
a company we bought in 2008 (which of course should make it incredibly 
cheap for us to use internally).

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