Wow it does give me food for thought. Sounds like you're well versed in these types of environments. Another question if you don't mind. In this environment would SUSE linux work? And would they be able to use Ximian and Evolution to connect to an exchange server for email/calendar and those type of office functions?
From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:ib...@listserv.uark.edu] On Behalf Of Matthew Donald Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 2:07 PM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: Virtualized Desktop Firstly, you need to know the expected environment before you can work out anything. Lets assume that you want to provide Firefox for browsing, Lotus Notes for email, Symphony for office and x3270 for mainframe access. All of these run under Linux and, in addition, Notes and Symphony are Eclipse-based which means JVM's. What I wouldn't do is give each user a separate Linux guest. I'd probably look at around 4 Linux guests. These guest would have all 1000 users logged onto them. One guest would provide the desktop. That is, every user would log onto a single guest using X-Windows and maybe Gnome (but I'd look at Enlightenment as it has a lower memory footprint). The desktop would have icons for Notes, Symphony etc. Clicking an icon would run a remote app on one of the other guests. Any user running Firefox or x3270 would run the app on this guest. A second guest would run Notes. Every time a user clicked the Notes icon, it would start it would start the Notes app on the second guest. The third and fourth guests would have Symphony workload spread between them. When a user clicked the Symphony icon, half would run the app on the third guest and half on the fourth guest. Essentially, the model is to have the basic desktop and the non-java apps on one guest and the java workload spread over the other three guests. I know a config along these lines would work, since the State of Florida did something like this in the late-90's. They were using four 8-way Intel P3 boxes running Linux with Netscape, Wordperfect and Quattro. I'm pretty sure they were supporting more than 1000 users. As to resources, I don't know of any benchmarks, so the following is based on my experience with z/VM +z/Linux + Websphere. My gut feel is that you could probably run this sort of workload with 4 IFL's and somewhere between 96G and 128G, depending on the number of simultaneous users. I may be over-estimating the CPU workload. Most of the memory requirement would be for JVM's. I'd allow somewhere between 128M and 256M per JVM. So long as the GC was running no more frequently than every 8 seconds or so and each GC run was freeing at least 30% of the heap on each run then the sizing would be adequate. Another problem you are likely to hit is in networking. The X-Windows protocol has outbound connections from the Linux guest to the terminal. I don't know about your environment, but many site use VPN's internally with each group being restricted to a single VPN sandbox. The problem is that many VPN clients (such as Aventail) only allow connections from the terminal to the server, and not the other way around. Hope this gives you food for thought Matthew Donald On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 7:30 AM, Ward, Mike S <mw...@ssfcu.org> wrote: Hello, all. I have a question. It seems that we are looking into a virtualized desktop environment (Single Image) on our distributed side. I kind of laugh at this because that's where we came from with VM and an OS running under VM (Green Screen) long ago and now it's making full circle. In VM how do you determine the amount of hardware MIPS, Disk, Etc... for let's say 1000 users? Is there any kind of formula to go by? I know in the distributed environment, it will probably take a lot of disk space, and as far as performance I don't think it would be as snappy as a real VM system. I used to work at a shop where we had 2500 users and a few with APL, that's right APL. Anyone that's been around knows what APL programmers did for VM. And in that shop response time was good even under MVS/CICS under VM. Anyway any comments, suggestions, criticisms are welcome. 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