Per Jessen said the following on 06/17/2013 08:24 AM:
No, not blades - for instance an HP DL585 with quad opterons, each with 16 cores.
Ah. Intel architecture. I think I saw something like that at a show-and-tell last year. Someone bragging that what they were running supported so many hundred "VDI" via VMWare instances. The remote terminals were older PCs using "re-purposed PCs" using RDP or something. Personally I felt the TCO quoted was a sham; the remote terminals were well equipped XP boxes but they still had to pay for the VMWare licences and the W/7 licences in the server. Now they had to have a VMware specialist who was 'tuning' and 'balancing' the server and deciding who was to have 'golden' accounts. Contrariwise ... One slow day over the winter I pulled a (yet another) junker out of the Closet of Anxieties and loaded it up with 1G of memory and a 40G disk and put, I think it was 12.2 (might have been mageiaV2 - definitely a systemd based thing) on it and set up some VNC and got 4 otherwise idle end users to try it out. I set up the server/vnc with xfce. Of _course_ there were complaints: -- why can't I have KDE? -- why can't I have firefox? this midori isn't as good as firefox -- can I have six desktops instead of four? stuff like that. But they ran Thunderbird, libreoffice and acroread OK. None of the heavy stuff like gimp. The one consistent performance complaint was -- when I move my mouse backwards and forwards fast the pointer can't keep up Lets see. This is Linux. So we have shared code. One person is running libreoffice so the code is 'in memory' and as a result the next person who starts up gets it FAST! All manner of libraries are shared. No matter how many people, there is only one copy of the code ever in core. Now this was a pretty underpowered machine. If everybody did something demanding at exactly the same time the single core, slow CPU just wasn't up to it. So long as it was simply browsing and reading mail with lots of 'pauses' everything was fine. But four users was the limit. Maybe if I was using sphinux - Sphinx Linux - http://sourceforge.net/p/sphinux/wiki/Home/ things would have been better ... :-) But my point here is that a multi-seat multi-user desktop Linux is much more resource efficient than the citrix- replacement vmware VDI. More to the point, it can run on other architectures. We know that ARM can be more efficient than Intel architecture. I wonder how many vnc sessions a Raspberry Pi can support? And then there are the RISC architectures from various vendors, not to mention ageing equipment like old Vaxen. I'm not saying there isn't a role for virtualization; I'm just giving this example of how the *NIX architecture can be more efficient and how non-Intel equipment can be used. I look forward to learning more about Wayland and about how systemd will support multi-seat using it, since that should be massively more efficient than vnc! Of course this is only Linux. being efficient, being flexible, being low cost, has never cut it against the massively funded marketing behind the Wintel machine. -- How long did the whining go on when KDE2 went on KDE3? The only universal constant is change. If a species can not adapt it goes extinct. That's the law of the universe, adapt or die. -- Billie Walsh, May 18 2013 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org