On Aug 9, 2006, at 9:44 AM, David Boyes wrote:
It is *technically* possible to run unmodified Windows applications on
zSeries (photos on request). It is *prohibitively* resource-
intensive to
do so, and provides no consolidation or licensing benefits. Each
virtual machine running a Intel processor emulator and a copy of
Windows
consumes approximately 180-220 zSeries MIPS to emulate a 200-210 Mhz
Pentium II-class CPU idling at the desktop. No applications, just
desktop.
That obviously won't scale.
The argument
I
got was "well it runs on apple computers now"
No, you were mostly right. We did it here at SNA as a proof of
concept,
but there is no -- that's zero, nada, nyet, nein, it'll stop hurting
when you stop doing that -- basis for recommending such a thing for
production use.
Agreed.
However, Dave Jones may have been on to something, when he mentioned
Platform Solutions:
I don't know if Fundamental Software would have a cow if you did
this, but I see no reason why a beefy multi-way SMP intel box running
Flex/ES shouldn't give you, say, 20 or 30 MIPS of z/VM workload at
the same time it's got a couple things running on the Linux side of
things (because Flex *can* run z/VM just fine; we're using it now--
it's slower than the H70 was, but it's not awful by any means), and a
couple more things running on a Windows instance inside a VMware
container.
This isn't what your management means, of course, but you might get
low-end-of-adequate performance out of each environment, with enough
memory and also quite a bit of CPU horsepower (memory is a bigger
issue, though).
Adam
