"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bba91c$1@news.povray.org...
>
> But surely if you're going to run a guest OS on the physical host CPU, the 
> host CPU would need to have hardware support for enforcing the host 
> seperation?
>

I don't know how they work, but they can and do run on any standard modern 
PC.

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bba9d8$1@news.povray.org...

> Until yesterday, the only products I'd heard of where Bochs (only runs on 
> Linux) and VMware (AFAIK that's extremely expensive).

Mostly, but one of their server products is free now.

> Oh, and doesn't Micro$oft now have some product that's just called 
> "virtual server" or something undistinctive? Presumably that's a server 
> product that is only available enterprise customers who've signed an 
> NDA...

Yes they do, and if you'd read a few lines up you'd  have seen that. It's 
free. As in, go and download, no purchases or NDAs necessary.
I don't personally run virtual server, I get by just fine with it's little 
brother (Virtual PC), but it's not a server-only app. It does run on XP, 
though it's designed more for server-usage.
Then, of course, there's Hyper-V built into Server 2008.

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> Only trouble is... it would have to be a pretty damned big USB stick. DSL 
> is nice, but rather minimal. (Shocker.) KNOPPIX is 700 MB compressed, and 
> decompresses to something like 4 GB...

ebuyer have a 8GB USB stick for 14.09 inc VAT.  You could buy a couple of 
them, one for the OS/programs, and another one for data files etc.

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>> Only trouble is... it would have to be a pretty damned big USB stick. DSL 
>> is nice, but rather minimal. (Shocker.) KNOPPIX is 700 MB compressed, and 
>> decompresses to something like 4 GB...
>
> ebuyer have a 8GB USB stick for 14.09 inc VAT.  You could buy a couple of 
> them, one for the OS/programs, and another one for data files etc.

Or get this beast:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140327

(I didn't even realise you could get 32GB USB sticks now!)

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>> Until yesterday, the only products I'd heard of where Bochs (only runs 
>> on Linux) and VMware (AFAIK that's extremely expensive).
> 
> Mostly, but one of their server products is free now.

I see...

>> Oh, and doesn't Micro$oft now have some product that's just called 
>> "virtual server" or something undistinctive? Presumably that's a 
>> server product that is only available enterprise customers who've 
>> signed an NDA...
> 
> Yes they do, and if you'd read a few lines up you'd  have seen that. 

As I say, I couldn't remember it's exact name, so I wasn't sure if the 
virtual server you were referring to was the M$ product or somebody else's.

> It's free. As in, go and download, no purchases or NDAs necessary.

That's an... interesting move. Still, I guess if you have 100 virtual 
servers and they all run Windows, you still need 100 server licenses.

> I don't personally run virtual server, I get by just fine with it's 
> little brother (Virtual PC), but it's not a server-only app. It does run 
> on XP, though it's designed more for server-usage.
> Then, of course, there's Hyper-V built into Server 2008.

Until yesterday, I had always assumed that any kind of emulation or 
virtualisation solution would be roughly 1,000,000x slower than native 
execution, so it's not something I've ever been interested in. Hence 
it's something I know almost nothing about. However, since it appears 
that you can actually run real software at almost native speeds, 
suddenly it becomes far more interesting... ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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scott wrote:

>> ebuyer have a 8GB USB stick for 14.09 inc VAT.  You could buy a couple 
>> of them, one for the OS/programs, and another one for data files etc.
> 
> Or get this beast:
> 
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140327
> 
> (I didn't even realise you could get 32GB USB sticks now!)

I was looking at all this myself just last night. ;-)

There seems to be a rather big jump from 8GB to 32GB with nothing in the 
middle. Hmm. (And yeah, *I* didn't know they'd got that big now either. 
Last time I looked, 4GB was about the best that money could buy.)

But anyway, the 8GB stick certainly seems like a very reasonably 
proposition, and I am seriously considering such a thing. ;-)

As an aside, my current USB stick (which I always take everywhere with 

the postage was vastly more than the actual drive! Best of all: it's 
shiny. (You can actually see your reflection in it.) The cap is actually 


-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> However, the idea of being able to just plug in a USB stick and click an 
> icon and instantly have a complete Linux environment set up exactly the 
> way I want it is... pretty neat, actually. It's like I can just put my 
> life on a USB stick, keep it in my pocket, and never again find myself 
> sat at a PC that lacks a development environment. Haskell EVERYWHERE! >:-D
> 
> Only trouble is... it would have to be a pretty damned big USB stick. 
> DSL is nice, but rather minimal. (Shocker.) KNOPPIX is 700 MB 
> compressed, and decompresses to something like 4 GB...

...The *other* thing I've often wanted to try is making a bootable USB 
flash drive. But apparently that's really hard. And besides, a virtual 
Linux environment has certain advantages. (E.g., you can use the local 
HD if you want.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bbaecf$1@news.povray.org...
>
> That's an... interesting move. Still, I guess if you have 100 virtual 
> servers and they all run Windows, you still need 100 server licenses.

Yup. But you'd also need 100 licences if you had 100 seperate physical 
servers, so it kinda works out cheaper to buy a single large server and 
virtualise several 'servers' onto one where possible. Save on power, 
cooling, space in the server room, probably on hardware. Plus most large 
companies will probably have site-licences so they don't worry about buying 
individual licences like you or I would.

> However, since it appears that you can actually run real software at 
> almost native speeds, suddenly it becomes far more interesting... ;-)
>

Most and almost.
I know that currently SQL Server isn't supported for production usage on any 
form of virtual machine. It may change in the upcoming months with HyperV.

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>> That's an... interesting move. Still, I guess if you have 100 virtual 
>> servers and they all run Windows, you still need 100 server licenses.
> 
> Yup. But you'd also need 100 licences if you had 100 seperate physical 
> servers, so it kinda works out cheaper to buy a single large server and 
> virtualise several 'servers' onto one where possible. Save on power, 
> cooling, space in the server room, probably on hardware.

In other words, a company that wouldn't buy 100 physical servers might 
consider running 100 virtual servers - so M$ still get their cheque.

> Plus most large 
> companies will probably have site-licences so they don't worry about 
> buying individual licences like you or I would.

How exactly does that work? I know how I *thought* it worked, but 
apparently I'm wrong; I heard one of our head IT guys complaining that 
we actually have more Server 2003 Enterprise installations running than 
we're "supposed to".

>> However, since it appears that you can actually run real software at 
>> almost native speeds, suddenly it becomes far more interesting... ;-)
> 
> Most and almost.
> I know that currently SQL Server isn't supported for production usage on 
> any form of virtual machine. It may change in the upcoming months with 
> HyperV.

"Supported" and "working" aren't the same thing. ;-)

It might be that it *works* perfectly well, but the testing department 
haven't assured themselves fully about it yet, so they don't want to 
spend time supporting it until they have.

(Theoretically *every* application should work... depending on how well 
the VM works anyway.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bbb6e7$1@news.povray.org...

>> Plus most large companies will probably have site-licences so they don't 
>> worry about buying individual licences like you or I would.
>
> How exactly does that work? I know how I *thought* it worked, but 
> apparently I'm wrong; I heard one of our head IT guys complaining that we 
> actually have more Server 2003 Enterprise installations running than we're 
> "supposed to".

Licencing's not my specialty. Sounds like you have a certain number of 
licences and you have more servers than that.
A previous company I worked for had a site-wide licence for certain apps. 
Meant they could install as many as they liked and still paid a fixed amount 
every year (support/upgrade contract). It's expensive for smaller companies, 
but as the number of PCs increase, it becomes more reasonable than paying 
for each one.

I don't know if it's still an option. As I said, I don't do licencing if I 
can help it.

>> Most and almost.
>> I know that currently SQL Server isn't supported for production usage on 
>> any form of virtual machine. It may change in the upcoming months with 
>> HyperV.
>
> "Supported" and "working" aren't the same thing. ;-)
>
> It might be that it *works* perfectly well, but the testing department 
> haven't assured themselves fully about it yet, so they don't want to spend 
> time supporting it until they have.

Indeed. The problem with multiple SQL instances in VMs is IO. You can 
allocate CPUs and memory to specific VMs, but there's still a single IO 
channel, and SQL database tend to be IO bound more often than CPU or memory.

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