>> 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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>> 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.

Right. Well we definitely have a company-wide license for Windows XP, 
Office 2003, and a few other bits. I *thought* we had a company-wide 
license for all the products we've licenced, but perhaps not?

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

Amen! But some of us don't have that luxury. :-S

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

Yeah, database engines by definition are I/O hungry (and memory hungry 
if you want to cache some of that rather than reread it a zillion 
times). Depending on what you're doing it can be CPU-heavy too, but 
mainly just I/O.

I'm sure it'll *work*, but how fast...? ;-)

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

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 

There's two ways to do it. The other one needs hardware virtualization 
support (practically any C2D+ and X2+ -processors do have it nowadays) 
and the other one uses somekind of simulation (dunno for sure how - but 
ie. Xen and Linux with slightly modified kernel can do this without 
mentionable powerloss).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
> That's apparently a bad idea. The VM would have different hardware than your
> real machine. It's like taking the HD off and booting it on a machine with
> completely different CPU, motherboard, network card, graphics card...
> 
> At least Windows would pop up a dozen "new hardware detected" messages :)
> 

But that's Windows ;). With Linux, you can compile different kernel for 
the VM/emu and ie. create another X.org -config file and use it with the 
VM/emu.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Invisible wrote:
>> VMWare's ESXi is free now, though that's a server-level product, not 

Isn't ESXi a hypervisor like Xen? Meaning that it kind of runs even 
under the main-OS, not on it.

> 
> Until yesterday, the only products I'd heard of where Bochs (only runs 
> on Linux) and VMware (AFAIK that's extremely expensive). Oh, and doesn't 

VMWare has several tools available free of cost. Check the website ;).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Invisible wrote:
> Presumably that requires *very* specialised hardware though?

Yes, but nowadays it's built into all the CPUs already. You couldn't do 
something like this on, say, a 68000 or an 8086.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Invisible wrote:
> I've heard of plenty of VMs that run on Linux, but I wasn't aware that 
> any free ones existed for Windoze.

Go to microsoft.com and do a search. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Invisible wrote:
> the emulated CPU to be maybe 1,000,000x slower than the real one, 

How many machine instructions do you think it takes to execute an 
interpreter for a machine instruction? A hundred maybe, but a million?

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Gail wrote:
> 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.

A good mainframe these days will run 30,000 images without much problem.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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