Virtualization (Was: Before you think of being a do-gooder...

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

> One example is electricity and cooling costs.  A mainframe running many
> instances of Linux, consumes far less power than the equivalent CPU
> power in small boxes.  There is also the CPU load of several servers not
> peaking at the same time, to bring average load closer to peak, system
> reliability etc.
>
There was a presentation on virtualization at the HLUG meeting at McMaster
U a few weeks ago. One of the university sysadmins explained that many
applications running under Windows occupy far less than the full resources
of the machine, but would normally require a stand-alone hardware machine
to execute. With virtualization, the server farm can be partitioned into
smaller virtual machines that are a better fit to the applications. This
has real impact on number of servers and server room requirements.

I have important applications that will only run under the Windows
operating system. (Electronic Workbench for circuit simulation and Proteus
for circuit board layout.) I personally like the idea of having
virtualization built in, debugged and ready to go - so I can switch
instantly between the two operating systems.

-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

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