VMware for Cyrus?

[Bron Gondwana]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 09:23:18AM -0500, John Madden wrote:
> FWIW, I won't run anything on hardware anymore unless I absolutely have 
> to.  To me, the benefits of running virtualized outweigh the pitfalls -- 
> dealing with real OS installs on real hardware, dealing with 
> multipathing and SAN (virtual disks are easy), etc.

Whereas I have totally the other approach.  I hate single points of
failure, so every machine has its own local storage.  Real OS installs
are automated - just netboot and it sets itself up.

And it's not turtles all the way down - at some point there's still
real hardware underneath whatever layers you're running.  We're managing
to get increadibly high levels of utilisation out our machines while
remaining fast by having everything sit as close to the metal as possible.
Power costs too much to waste it on virtualisation overhead!

Bron ( we do use virtualisation for our test machines, but production
       doesn't have any parts sub-machine-sized, so why split a machine? )