VMware getting replaced?

http://www.computerworld.com/softwar...,98814,00.html



Something I've yet to hear about is this processor ship partitioning technology they mention in the article.... Howin the hell would this work out? I mean yes I can understand you could do something like this with a processor but how in the hell would it work out? Anyone have any more articles on this?

Sounds awesome but I'm wondering if it's something that would work and with what benifits.

Partitioning a processor.... I think I like that in a way if it's like doing it to a HD. I could split my 2.40 GHz into a couple smaller ones and reduce heat, and have one processor partition just for XMMS so it doesn't skip, one for the security scripts I run each night with Cron, and the rest for me. That would be awesome because the boxes tend to lag when the scripts run at night.

And I could allocate some processor just for the FTPd running!

Wow this opened a whole can.

OK, this is too wierd. I had this idea about 4 or 5 years ago and dismissed it because it would involve way too many changes to current architecture and therefore OS's in the form that I visualised it. Besides, I'm no computer professional (or even aspiring to be one) so I never really followed it up. Looks like I was ahead of my time :(

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Quote:

---

Something I've yet to hear about is this processor ship partitioning technology they mention in the article.... Howin the hell would this work out? I mean yes I can understand you could do something like this with a processor but how in the hell would it work out? Anyone have any more articles on this?

---

Hardware Partitioning is present on IBM Mainframe since 1990. After 1998 (i think) you can see it on PowerPc Machines. You can run OS/400 and Linux on a PowerPC at same time.

There is two modes of operations:

a) easy way - physical partitioning. Each partition has its own processor(s), Memory and bus(es). You configure it at "bios" level (its not a bios really but instead a micro kernel sometimes running on a service processor) the resources for each partition before boot. On this case, you need at least one physical processor for each partitiion.

b) "cool" way - on this mode the connection between physical processor and logical (virtual) processor is gone; you can have just one CPU and run a lot of guest operating system with multiple processor EACH. How it works? No manufacturer will tell you this explicity, but there is a OVERHEAD, even with One O.S. with one processor: There is a "intermediate" level between all O.S.es and the hardware: a "hardware" dispatcher (there is a program, that runs at microarchitecture level that is responsible to schedulle and dispatch the O.s>. In fact its an O.S.). Think about Vmware running at "hardware level".


There is no magic here. All LPAR schemas (IBM naming) introduce an overhead. But sometimes its better ($$$) buy a large machine and split in several partitiions.