[Info-vax] OpenVMS servers and clusters as a cloud service

[Scott Dorsey]

Johnny Billquist  <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>
>What kind of nonsese is this? Google runs Linux. Do you think Google 
>only runs one app per machine??? They do not. Like I said before, 
>machine management is all automated, including scheduling jobs on 
>machines. And the system knows the load of different applications, and 
>can combine many applications on one machine, as long as there are 
>resources available.

Pretty much, yes, they only run one app per VM.  They run plenty of VMs on
each machine, but they rely on the hypervisor for that load management 
rather than the OS.

>One application per machine is such a nonsensical and uninformed belief 
>that it almost blows my mind. I can't comment on Windows at all, but in 
>the Unix/Linux world, nothing could be further from the truth.

It is a thing that has leaked from the Windows world into the Unix/Linux
world unfortunately, and it results in considerably higher overhead.  I
see it all over the place.  I agree it's a bad plan and horribly inefficient
and pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having an OS in the first place.

>There is a reason containers have been developed/pushed in Linux. To 
>increase isolation between multiple applications running on the same 
>machine. However, I do think all the knobs in VMS can be very useful in 
>this context. Unix sometimes certainly suffer because of the lack of 
>those (hello page quota).

Agreed.  Containers are a great thing, and admins are starting to use them
but they are catching on much too slowly.  The degree to which "Windows
Mentality" has pervaded the industry is horrifying.  We have a whole generation
of Linux admins who don't even know how to use the command line, believe it
or not.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."