the birdhouse in my soul

Red Hat announced in december 2009 that RHEL support for Intel Itanium was being dropped. On april 2nd, Microsoft announced that Windows 2008 R2 was going to be the last Windows version to support the Itanium platform. A chronicle of a death foretold...

Open source email and calendar solution provider Zimbra got acquired by VMware recently. While there's lots of angles to this story, it also confirms an important part of VMware's strategy: bigger and bigger hardware, running a powerful hypervisor, running thin and optimized OSes, running applications that perform business functions. To enable perfect mobility and ease-of-use, the OS and application will be packaged into so-called Virtual Appliances or vApps. Making the OS thinner is essential for this strategy, and goes against the core beliefs of competitor Microsoft. The succes of the vApp concept will be a deciding factor in the battle between these two giants.

One of the first steps in a virtualization project is building a list of workloads that will get virtualized, with a measurement or estimate of the resources that they will need. X MHz and Y MB, sum everything up, and let's say you get 30 GHz of CPU power and 20 GB of RAM. The hardware you'd like to run all those virtual machines on can handle two CPUs (dual-socket), four cores each (quad-core). That means that every physical server will give you between 20 and 25 GHz of CPU power. For memory, you'll buy 12 GB of RAM in each server. So the plan is to buy two of those servers, right ? Well, as long as your infrastructure is 100% healthy and running OK, two servers will do the job just fine. You've got enough resources, with a bit of headroom for overhead and future growth. But what happens when one of the physical servers is down ? Think of hardware problems, think of virtualization software upgrades, think of patching the hypervisor. Then the available resources are dow...