11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
4:29 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
These people think it's efficient to run a copy of
Windows 2003 on a
server (which needs a couple of gig of RAM to work well) and then run
multiple VMs on that containing copies of Windows 2003 or other
flavours of Windows. They think virtualisation is new and clever and
it doesn't occur to them that not only is this wasteful of resources,
but it's a nightmare to keep all those copies patched and current.
They think that encapsulating SCSI over TCP/IP is an
efficient way to
connect servers to disk farms.
I'm generally on board with what Liam said, in spirit at least. But I do
look at these two issues differently: They are both "outboard" fixes to
long-standing problems with NT and they make life easier in the trenches.
iSCSI makes up (in a clumsy way) for a lack of a "first class citizen"
network file protocol in NT. Since you can't run SQL Server over something
like NFS, it is about the only way to get it on a networked storage device.
And if you want some of the nice "storage virtualization" features like
volume snaps and clones, you pretty much want network storage.
Virtualization may waste resources, but CPU and RAM are the cheapeast
part of the stack now.
What you get is easy recovery of whole system images,
plus the ability run a bunch of legacy setups that ran on
dedicated machines 5 years ago on one new box.
That actually saves resources.
I guess what I am saying is, I'll take some slightly hacky ways to improve
life with an OS that I can't easily avoid, over the alternative
of just having to use said suboptimal OS with no extra help.