Fixing everything, really slowly

(cross-posted from my new work blog: grid things)

I recently presented at HP-CAST in Hamburg, Germany. The title was “Grid in Financial Services and Science: a comparison” to a tutorial session called “Portals, Grids, Clouds”.

I hadn’t intended to talk about clouds initialy but I decided to change the content to fit the tutorial session. I was quite pleased with the end result and the reception I got was pretty good so I thought I’d share the slides here.

Found via the still vaguely useful system news (formally Sun system news) site:

Oracle WebLogic Server can now run directly on Oracle VM without an operating system, a unique capability enabled by Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition.

This caught my eye because it’s kind of lame that Java applications in virtualised environments have to run behind so many layers of abstraction (Java Virtual Machine, Operating System, Visualised Server). You can read more about the product here:

What strikes me is a total lack of mention of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and the requirement that the product will only run under OracleVM. What a lost opportunity.

It’s one thing that they are locking customers in to their virtualization product (rather than letting them use VMWare, Citrix XenServer or Hyper-V), but its darn right stupid that it doesn’t support their own Virtualization products VirtualBox or the Xen implementation in Solaris.

I hate to judge early but it seems Oracle hasn’t changed one bit with the acquisition with Sun. They will continue to make overpriced products which needlessly lock customers in. I think that’s a shame.

Still, it would be interesting to know what they use for a file system in this thing.

I sometimes get asked about energy savings from thin clients. It’s fairly straightforward to work out the energy consumption of the clients, but it’s harder know how how much power to budget for on the server side. Without specific requirements it really is a case of “it depends”.

While reading the excelent Virtual Reality Check – Phase II (via Virtualization.info) I was amazed that they didn’t even mention power consumption. Their tests showed that you could support between 80 and 165 user sessions from the test hardware (an HPDL380G6). I was interested to find out how much power this server uses, the answer (after way too long with HP’s Windows only, yet HTML, and Flash based Power Advisor) is about 410Watts, that’s between 5 and 2.5 Watts per user. Not bad!

Now I’d be the first to say that this hardware setup isn’t wat you’d use (or all that you’d need) in a thin client deployment of this size, but still it’s an impressive number. As the Virtual Reality Check report says the improvements in the last year are almost entirely due to CPU improvements from Intel. Nehalem certainly is quick.