On 10/5/07, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote: > Dave Miner writes: > > at which those customers tend to move in upgrading. An in-place switch > > is theoretically possible in the same way that we do DSR (disk space > > reallocation) in the current installer when you need to change slice > > sizes. But our research indicates that most of the customers we're > > talking about here don't actually bother doing upgrades, anyway, so I'm > > not sure we'll do that work. > > Probably off-topic for this thread, but I would expect the upgrade > experience to be an important topic during architectural review. > Bring the research results. :->
Actually I've been thinking about some somewhat related virtualization issues, so I'll split this off as a separate thread.. (Might be somewhat off-topic, but I'm not sure where the correct place to raise this would be). One of the big things about IBM mainframe virtualization, is that they allow customers to run very older OSes in VMs, and will still provide commercial support on Modern HW/Hypervisor. VMWare is using the same pitch now, for clients that are running old Windows 2000, Windows NT, Netware and other older x86 applications and OSes. (Basically allowing them to continue to run on hardware that isn't natively supported by the OS.) Currently, the main reason upgrade the OS, is because they upgrade the Hardware and are forced to upgrade the OS. As LDOMs, and in particular Xen takes off, I see Sun facing a challenge. If an OS currently meets all of a clients needs for a particular application, and they can migrate it to a VM using a tool similar to VMWare's P2Vtool (Physical to Virtual), thus allowing them to run on modern hardware ad infinitum using virtualization, why wouldn't they just keep migrating the VM to newer and newer versions of HW/Hypervisor? (Especially if their ISVs continue to provide support). I think, a non insignificant percentage of Sun's customer base will want Sun to continue to support these "older" OSes. (And there might actually be a market for an LDOM P2Vtool for older Sparc OSes.) Cheers, Brian > > -- > James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> > Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 > MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 > _______________________________________________ > install-discuss mailing list > install-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/install-discuss > -- - Brian Gupta http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/
