[Info-vax] Marketing ideas for VSI ?

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2018-12-14 kl. 15:46, skrev Jon Schneider:
> On 14/12/2018 13:41, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> One idea I had was something along the lines of the disaster-proof
>> video showing what VMS clusters can do. I was thinking of a demo
>> something along these lines:
> 
> I certainly get irritated by videos of people building clusters out of 
> Raspberry Pis running SimH with presumably no more of a concept of what a 
> cluster actually does from the client's point of view than I have.
> 
> My understanding is it's maybe the (Files-11) filesystem and maybe RDB or 
> something. But if that's it how is that useful in today's world when the 
> clients are web browsers ?

You have the same web server running on all cluster memebers. The client
web connect goes to one of them (through the common cluster IP address).

When it is time to upgrade VMS, you can take down one server at a time
without any user/client downtime. If you run a fully VMS and cluster
aware web server, you ask it to close and wait for any active client
connections to disconnect, so no user interuption at all.

And yes, Rdb is fully cluster aware of course, so all data is in one
common database copy and fully shared over the cluster. An active
transaction crashing on one server is rolled back on another.

A lot of this can be done in other environments, but not as integrated
in, and support by, the operating system (as it is in VMS).

> 
> So please explain what clustering actually _does_ and sell me VMS (not that 
> I am in a position to buy into it on behalf of anybody).
> 
> Jon