I broke this out of the GPLv3 discussion line ... lest it be lost in poor signal to noise level.
----------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------- Subject: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Community participation (was GPLv3 ravings) From: "Bob Palowoda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, February 3, 2007 04:14 To: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Bob Palowoda wrote: > sorry about the snippage ... > The client was consolidating all their old windows > boxes on a couple of > 8 core Opteron boxes with VMWare ESX, so we just > built a Solaris virtual > machine and ran with that. Cop out, but pragmatic! I was recently asked by an organization with piles of users for ways to consolidate some server room resources. I suggested that piles of their 1U and 2U/PC gear could collapse into an 8-core Opterons with VMWare ESX server. That was when the costs arrived. And killed it. The cost of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise for 2 processors was over $5000 USD. That is just the license for the virtualization software. For only 2 procs. So double that for an 4-way Opteron is $10000 and then a Platinum support contract is about 20% of that per year. So add in $2000 a year per 4-way machine in a rack of five machines. So each machine gets slammed $10,000 for VMWare license one time cost and then the support is $2000 a year per machine per year forever! The cost of the server itself is in the zone of $16K with about 16GB of RAM and some fibre to the storage. We are at one time costs of $26K per machine and then a rack of them is $120K easily. Each rack will cost $12K a year every year for support costs. The whole idea got thrown in the trash real quick becuase its just a whole lot cheaper to pay for the power of all those 1U and 2U boxes that run doing 90% nothing all the time. Then we looked at Red Hat Enterprise AS4 top of the line at $2500 fee per machine. Platinum Support is $500 a year also. Then we need to add in VMware Server on top of that, lose the VMware cluster features in ESX and gain a new level of complexity with Red Hat Linux underneath VMWare Server. Plus support costs for VMWare Support. That was another idea looked at as a per rack cost and it got tossed in the trash as obscenely expensive as well as complex. Not to mention the whole "we are a Sun shop and we can't trust that" icky feel that came along with it. The last idea rolled out was the Sun Blade 8000 with 8 procs in it. Insane costs again. Personally, having looked at it, I think that virtualization is still a sham in terms of the costs. While it would be nice to run Linux in BrandZ zones as well as virtual Windows server sessions all on big huge Sun servers but it just can't be done. The virtual machine software for Solaris does not exist or won't be released from VMware any time soon. Sun has no solution to offer other than "migrate to Solaris" and then once you absorb those costs you pay for Sun support. I hope you hear a lot of frustration here. I was expecting some sort of holy virtualization angel to swoop down and whisper the solution in my ear but what really happened was another little demon that showed up asking for more money than you can imagine. The very idea of virtualization turned out to be a sham. There was no real solution for the corporate type user. While the Solaris Zone is very very *real* solution for multiple Solaris servers there seems to be no way to cost effectively virtualize Windows servers. Any solution that I could come up with was either a hack or a "that's not Fortune 500 supported" solution. anyone have any thoughts ? Dennis _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
