[Xen-users] Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović <shoom013@xxxxxxxxx>]

The problem is they won't start dying, they were made not to - it was meant to support what (mission) critical business is ... but I am not here for that.

I would like to hear, people, what do you think the future of commercial linux distros on Itanium is one hand, and on the other - what is the future of Xen in commercial distros ?
Is Xen going to be supported on Suse on Itanium in future ?
What #$%&! is going on ?

Red Hat is the most respectable player having linux as business model, and so to say it is the leader in open source community. But it has given confusing signals about Xen, and now Itanium. I should've understood better what happened with cowboyhat linux and fedora ... nevertheless, what I have is a comitted software vendor like SAP who supports open source (as much a proprietary one can - SAP supports officially trend of moving from Unix to Linux), and Oracle does, too (with Sun and human power involved in Xen on ia64 additionally) - it is not a small thing to have official support for Xen or KVM virtualization by a big name such as SAP, and many commercial distros (they have to be like that because of the nature of the business) including Red Hat and Suse. Now I find that HP supports on their highly competitive BladeSystem matrix control software only VMWare, Hyper-V and XenServer - KVM and Xen not even announced, while Red Hat is involved in making Insight Orchestration Designer templates for RHEL, JBoss and stuff (something like virtual appliances, but story is bigger than that) but not with RHEV ?!?! Is that the price of abandoning Xen in RHEL6 (HP treats that as a clear signal), and leaving Itanium after that was a bit scary ... I've been browsing through SAP sd2tier, TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks and now I am even more convinced that something wrong is going on. I can understand that market share is important, but different vendors (including SAP) obviously have different perspectives (Intel has more or less equal income from ia64 and non-ia64, so it is here to stay !!!), and I won't tell now how it actually looks like to me ... I think that HP lost good competitors, but above all, I am afraid that important part of open source community is in a bigger loss ... __"I feel blue"__ ...

ZP.

PS.

Just look what I have here, tell me what you think, and more is coming on very soon:

      http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17592

2010/1/16 t35t0r <t35t0r@xxxxxxxxx>

2010/1/15 Zoran Popović <shoom013@xxxxxxxxx>:

> I feel deceived :( ... Itanium is not going to be supported after March 2014
> and in RHEL 6 ?!!?!?!! I know this probably is a bit late reaction, I have
> also a SR open with this question and a business case officially  documented
> in my company (I can send it gladly to anyone interested) with proposal
> based on RHEL and HP Integrity blades (Itanium). I will open another SR if

Sure, I'm interested in looking at your business case. We have two SGI
itanium altix 350's (8 node/16p total) and another with 2 nodes/4p and
all I know is that replacement parts are expensive, the warranty
contracts are expensive, and the systems are expensive, and they have
a bigger rack and environmental footprint. The 1.5GHz 16p system has
lower performance than a single node 16p 2.93GHz Xeon nehalem system
(for our computational work loads). Let's just say we're not replacing
the itaniums as the nodes start dieing. Ours used to run RHEL3 but SGI
made us switch to SLES9 or 10, perhaps that's another option if you
really want itanium support (don't know about novell's plans).

In any case, even SGI's new "UV" large shared memory/many cores system
uses nehalem CPUs.

HTH

_______________________________________________
rhelv5-list mailing list
rhelv5-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users