On Wednesday, 08/06/2003 at 07:36 ZE8, John Summerfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's time someone tried for new records there: that's quite old now, and > IBM has new boxes. > > Other than "it depends," how many copies is a reasonable upper limit? > Where do the VM overheads become too significant? Are there workloads > that will fully load a top-end zBox running one copy of Linux, and if > so, is this as sensible as tens of thousands of copies?
Since I can't say "it depends," I'll have to say "there are various factors such as h/w configuration, and CPU and memory utilization patterns that affect the answer to your question". :-) We use the phrase "tens to hundreds" because that matches the real-world experience of our customers. I think "tens of thousands" is not reasonable right now. I'd rather split that load into multiple VM instances rather than load down a single VM instance anyway. Easier to manage; easier to control. (I wouldn't want to explain to the boss why a loss of an LPAR or VM image took down 20,000 servers with it. Just because I didn't want to create another VM instance? Hmmmm.....) That old saying applies: Just because you *can* do it doesn't mean you *should* do it. (Maybe the Jurassic Park image will help? :-) ) Alan Altmark Sr. Software Engineer IBM z/VM Development
