this is being answered on the wrong list, go to the VM or Linux, list
we run 5 IFLS and just started moving servers over so we do not have a
number to give you yet
driving this is mostly Oracle licensing, for 100 servers you need 100
licenses, for 100 linux guests you need 1 IFL license
Mark Post
<mp...@novell.com
> To
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11/17/2009 01:22
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>>> On 11/17/2009 at 12:18 PM, Lindy Mayfield <lindy.mayfi...@ssf.sas.com>
wrote:
> I read in z/Journal that one mainframe can host 1,500 Linux servers.
What
> sort of mainframe can do this? How many CPU's would it take? How many
CPU's
> are the maximum?
As any discussion of capacity or performance requires, "it depends."
You're not going to fit that much CPU-intensive workload onto any mainframe
available today. You could fit that many 0-1% busy systems on a couple of
IFLs. Real life workload is going to be somewhere in between (big
surprise). I believe (without having found the person or persons that
originated this number) that the 1,500 number came from extrapolating the
"average CPU busy" of a modern Intel system to a full-blown z10 EC. As
usual, marketing trumps technical details.
> I also read in z/Journal that the lines between a mainframe computer (the
> z10 to be specific) and a super computer are being blurred.
Given that most supercomputers these days are clusters of
hundreds/thousands of Intel or PPC boxes, no way. Mainframes are good, but
they're not magic as we well know.
> When I was at
> GuideSHARE Europe two years ago (in Dresden, lovely city) they had a
hardware
> guy there next to a z10 with the nice green stripe down it, and he told
me
> that the mainframe is great for transactional processing, as always, but
not
> too much suited for WebSphere, Java stuff, etc. That's why they had to
add
> speciality engines, etc. Well, that's how I remember it.
If that was indeed what he said, then he was confused. Specialty engines
were introduced for sales/marketing/political reasons, not technical ones.
IFLs, the original specialty engine, were created specifically so that
customers could add Linux workloads to their existing mainframes, and not
have the additional capacity bump up their z/OS software charges. That
worked so well that zIIPs and zAAPs followed, but for z/OS only. (Linux
systems don't "need" them because the pricing is different to start with.)
It's not that CPs are "not well suited" for things like WAS, or DB2. It's
because customers resisted buying more of them because of the increased
software costs. If IBM were to replace all the zIIPs and zAAPs with
standard engines, and your software costs didn't change, customers would be
much better off since they would get the full use of the engines, and
things would run just as well if not better. Of course, that's not going
to happen, from all that we've seen o!
ver the years.
Mark Post
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