I looked at VMWare and liked it, I liked it a lot - but it doesn't "really" present a virtual machine with virtual hardware like mainframe VM does, at least not 100%. Among the problems (which were significant for my intended use of it) are the fact that there is NO support for PCMCIA devices, and a NIC cannot be dedicated to a "virtual machine". Networking is handled by having the hose own the NIC, run TCP/IP, and set up a private LAN between the virtual machines and the host's TCP/IP.
If they ever support dedicating NICs and PCMCIA devices to "virtual machines" I'll definitely give it another look. All in all, I thought it was a pretty good performer despite it's short-comings. Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room 6030 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20224 Voice: (202) 927-4188 FAX: (202) 622-6726 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----Original Message----- From: Adam Thornton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 11:10 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: z/VM and VMware On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 09:39, Tobleman, Vicky wrote: > We're considering partitioning larger Intel servers using VMware and > setting up our Linux environments ... production and development. Is > anyone else doing this - have any experiences to share? Pros/Cons? > And is 6 servers per engine consolidation reasonable (i.e., 4 engines > would equate to 24 machines)? Realizing that it is dependent on type > of workload - file, print, web, etc. We've got a few Linux Intel > boxes and would like to avoid the WinTel farms we've acquired. It's a reasonable idea. Obviously how many virtual servers you get per physical box varies by workload and by box. In general, if what you want to do is file, print, and web (but you don't need IIS-specific stuff for the web applications) you're better off in terms of performance-per-cycle with Linux than Windows--you probably knew that, though. Linux/390 gives you much, much better manageability than a farm of VMWare boxes, but you probably knew that too. One thing that VMWare gives you that is absolutely wonderful, and too often overlooked, is consistency of hardware. Two machines of what is supposedly the same model from the same vendor will, in the x86 world, often have notably different components; VMWare does an end-run around that, so the "hardware" each of your VMWare images sees really is identical. That makes a fair chunk of the pain of Windows go away right there. Adam
