Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Virtual Strategy on Virtuozzo I liked this article, especially the vendors answer about their positioning in the marketplace. Inspired, I talked to a Virtuozzo sales rep, and found out that their customers typically run 40-60 OS instances on a single rackmount production server (dual Xeon - nothing fancy.) They get such good #'s because their virtualization strategy is a bit closer to BSD Jails in that they share lots of resources with the host OS. But sadly, it is unlike Containers/jails/Xen/etc in that MS requires an OS/etc license for each installed copy of their software. It's painful to think you can rent a $400/mo server and reliably host 60 different clients on it, but the MS tax for a web/db app could come to several 100K. And you are forced to pay that tax not because the software is great, but for exactly the opposite reason: security and management issues dictate dedicated servers. Grrrr. ( via Alessandro ) 4:32:48 PM      comment []  trackback []

Foreshadowing I was contacted about a week ago about a stealth mode commercial postgresql vendor who wanted some beta feedback. I haven't gotten the beta yet, but am looking forward to it. They had the admirable and now very familiar goal of the other OSS hybrid ventures (ActiveGrid, Spikesource, etc) : removing the last few barriers to enterprise acceptance. They should be decloaking in a month or so, so hopefully I can write more then. 9:57:25 AM      comment []  trackback []