"Eero Ahonen" <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote in message 
news:48bc0684$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail wrote:
>>
>> Then, of course, there's Hyper-V built into Server 2008.
>
> Which, according to Hype(tm) is Ultimately New Technology Innovation By 
> Microsoft(R), since it uses the Brand-New Never-Before-Seen hypervisor 
> technology (which is, still according to the same Hype(tm), pretty much 
> similar as in Xen and AFAIK with ESXi, but apparently they don't count, 
> since Innovating Sells).
>

No one ever suggested that MS's marketing dept was 'honest'. I've heard a 
couple of MS developers complaining about the massaged facts the marketing 
dept was pushing.

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Darren New wrote:

> How many machine instructions do you think it takes to execute an 
> interpreter for a machine instruction?

How about, hmm, "A LOT"?

The IA32 instruction set is a twisted tangle with no reason or rhyme to 
it. The op-codes follow no particular pattern. The instruction lengths 
very widely. What with MMX, 3D NOW!, SSE, SSE2 and so on, there's dozens 
of registers of all different shapes and sizes. And we haven't even 
talked about all the emulation required for the I/O devices...

> A hundred maybe, but a million?

Last time I checked, the IA32 instruction set is *very* complex. I doubt 
it's got any simpler since then...

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

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>> 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. :-)

Yeah, if I had *wanted* to find one, this would be the first stage. 
However, as I said, I assumed that any VM would be absurdly slow and 
therefore unusable, so I didn't bother looking for one. (Not to mention 
that it's not immediately obvious just how useful these things are until 
you've played with one...)

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

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Darren New wrote:
> 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.

So when you say "works on any reasonably modern PC", what you *actually* 
mean is "works on any brand new bleeding-edge PC"?

For example, it wouldn't work on the Pentium-III server in my server 
room. (?)

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

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Gail wrote:

> No one ever suggested that MS's marketing dept was 'honest'. I've heard 
> a couple of MS developers complaining about the massaged facts the 
> marketing dept was pushing.

One might argue that if MS were to be "honest" about their products, 
they'd never sell any because they all suck so much...

...especially if that "one" happens to be a Linux advocate. ;-)

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

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Darren New wrote:
> I've been thinking of playing with some virtual machine technology, but 
> I wasn't aware there was one under Windows that would run Linux. Which 
> virtual machine are you running here? (I.e., what's the Windows software?)

	And I'll give another nod to VirtualBox. It's free, and running Windows 
on it was a breeze. I assume the same is the case the other way round.

	Haven't used VMWare products. They're more well known, though.

-- 
Computer Lie #1: You'll never use all that disk space.


                     /\  /\               /\  /
                    /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                        >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                    anl

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"Eero Ahonen" <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote in message 
news:48bc0856$1@news.povray.org...
but
> depending on DB-size etc the saved cost of another HW can possibly give 
> you even better HW for that one machine to have better IOs for the DB, 
> it's not purely black and white).

No, it's not.
In my experience though, the majority of DB servers that have bottlenecks 
have IO ones, even on physical machines. Virtualising those means needing 
separate IO paths, separate physical raid arrays, etc or the virtuals will 
compeate with one another for IO. I know that all the SQL MVPs who have 
given an opinion on this have recommend not virtualising a production DB, 
especially not a large one with lots of activity.
I'd happily virtualise a dev or test environment. Not happy about doing it 
to a heavily-utilised prod server though. Not right now.

> Then again, MS surely don't want to support Xen, while they're working on 
> HyperV - no wonder SQL Server ain't supported on such competitor-software 
> ;).

Well, VMWare's joined the SVVP 
(http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm), so 
there'll have to be some level of support. How much remains to be seen.
SQL's not supported at all on existing MS virtualisation products (virtual 
server, virtual PC) and it's not currently supported on Hyper-V (which has 
been available for a month or so)

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bc09bb$1@news.povray.org...
> Darren New wrote:
>> 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.
>
> So when you say "works on any reasonably modern PC", what you *actually* 
> mean is "works on any brand new bleeding-edge PC"?

No, he means any modern PC.

> For example, it wouldn't work on the Pentium-III server in my server room. 
> (?)

Sure it would.

Virtual PC requires minimum a 400 MHz Pentium-compatible processor.
VMWare version 5 (previous version) requires a 400MHz processor from the 
following list:
# Intel: Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M (including 
computers with CentrinoT mobile technology), XeonT (including "Prestonia")
# AMDT: AthlonT, Athlon MP, Athlon XP, DuronT, OpteronT

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bc0a2a$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail wrote:
>
>> No one ever suggested that MS's marketing dept was 'honest'. I've heard a 
>> couple of MS developers complaining about the massaged facts the 
>> marketing dept was pushing.
>
> One might argue that if MS were to be "honest" about their products, 
> they'd never sell any because they all suck so much...

Not all of them.
You're generalising to a hell of a lot of stuff that you've probably never 
used based on your experiences with a couple.

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Gail wrote:
> 
> No, it's not.
> In my experience though, the majority of DB servers that have 
> bottlenecks have IO ones, even on physical machines. Virtualising those 
> means needing separate IO paths, separate physical raid arrays, etc or 
> the virtuals will compeate with one another for IO. 

Yep, but think about a small firm, just started. They want reliable 
hardware, they need 2 servers, one for databases and one for something 
else that's not so IO-sensitive (authenticating etc). Now, would they 
get better performance for the DB's by buying 2 individual servers or by 
  using all that money on one server, from which they could utilize most 
of the IO from the DB-engine?

I'd probably go with the latter one. Probably, not surely.

> I know that all the 
> SQL MVPs who have given an opinion on this have recommend not 
> virtualising a production DB, especially not a large one with lots of 
> activity.
> I'd happily virtualise a dev or test environment. Not happy about doing 
> it to a heavily-utilised prod server though. Not right now.

Yep, there's a huge scale on the db-sized used over the globe. Even if 
you'll count out the 2-5 -table one-query-per-day -style ones I 
mentioned earlier.

> Well, VMWare's joined the SVVP 
> (http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm), so 
> there'll have to be some level of support. How much remains to be seen.

Ahh, nice.

> SQL's not supported at all on existing MS virtualisation products 
> (virtual server, virtual PC) 

As said, AFAIK those are the ones that run over the main OS, they really 
can't pass any unemulated/virtualized command straightly to the hardware.

> and it's not currently supported on Hyper-V 
> (which has been available for a month or so)

Hyper-V is still pretty new and at least I wouldn't be sure if they have 
actually had the time to test it enough. I'd guess the support on 
Hyper-V would get better after some time.

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

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