Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on February 09, 2007 05:36 AM
While I have bashed Tina's articles in the past for trying to make one and two server migrations at unheard of mom and pop shops into a major news event, like <a href="http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/01/02/1557237" title="linux.com">this ridiculous one</a linux.com>, this article about a major corporation is of much greater interest.
Unfortunately the article lacks technical detail and possibly accuracy. For instance "400 CPUs on two IBM System z900 servers" should surely have specified that these were virtual CPUs, as the largest z900 I've ever heard of only supports 16 processors. None the less, 200 virtual machines per box is awesome, even if the box is IBM big iron.
Since Tina mentioned SuSE, I must assume that they are using Novell's SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 with its Xen virtualization component. But, The story doesn't provide much specific information about the guest OSes. Are we to assume that Nationwide is running 400 virtual instances of Linux? That was my first impression, but later in the article it talks about using VMWare to virtualize Windows. This seems unnecessary if they are already using Xen but, who knows what they are doing. The article lacks information and clarity.
I'd very much like to see this story expanded with greater detail and accuracy.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 09, 2007 05:36 AMUnfortunately the article lacks technical detail and possibly accuracy. For instance "400 CPUs on two IBM System z900 servers" should surely have specified that these were virtual CPUs, as the largest z900 I've ever heard of only supports 16 processors. None the less, 200 virtual machines per box is awesome, even if the box is IBM big iron.
Since Tina mentioned SuSE, I must assume that they are using Novell's SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 with its Xen virtualization component. But, The story doesn't provide much specific information about the guest OSes. Are we to assume that Nationwide is running 400 virtual instances of Linux? That was my first impression, but later in the article it talks about using VMWare to virtualize Windows. This seems unnecessary if they are already using Xen but, who knows what they are doing. The article lacks information and clarity.
I'd very much like to see this story expanded with greater detail and accuracy.
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