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> but it's not just for finance. some mainframe customers have virtualized thousands of "your personal domain and web server running php/perl/nodejs To be fair

by Macha 4y ago

> but it's not just for finance. some mainframe customers have virtualized thousands of "your personal domain and web server running php/perl/nodejs To be fair, shared hosting providers did this on x86 server machines on a scale of 100s of customers in the 90s, and I'm sure a modern revival on 2022 could do 1000s also

bayindirh 4y ago
We have a 10 machine Proxmox cluster at the office, and no. It doesn’t lend itself to such capacities. Maybe we over-provision systems, and can fit that number of VMs, but what will be the performance? You can use a proper SMP machine with 16 sockets, but you are already at half mainframe price and journey-wise, and you’ll be wasting the machine’s capabilities.
marcus0x62 4y ago
Sure, but they way we did that back in the 90’s was very different, and carried a much lower overhead than LPARs in the IBM mainframe world or any hypervisor or container used today — shared hosting “virtualization” in the 90’s was little more than chroot jails, and frequently not even that.
- neverartful 4y ago
  I think you're confusing LPARS with guests under z/VM. A mainframe LPAR is a coarse-grained (relatively speaking) partitioning of the system. LPARS are created and managed by a Hardware Management Console (HMC), and run on PR/SM [0]. No one creates mainframe LPARS to run a VPS. Those would simply be a guest under z/VM. Realistically speaking, z/VM would be running in an LPAR (less than the whole of the mainframe resources) and then within z/VM's LPAR, z/VM hypervisor allows all of its guests to run concurrently. [0] https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=PR/SM https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=PR/SM
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    KVM is also available now in addition to z/VM. The IBM cloud “trusted environments” run on it.
  - marcus0x62 4y ago
    >> ... or any hypervisor or container used today ... > I think you're confusing LPARS with guests under z/VM. I am not, but thanks.

by Macha 4y ago

bayindirh 4y ago

We have a 10 machine Proxmox cluster at the office, and no. It doesn’t lend itself to such capacities. Maybe we over-provision systems, and can fit that number of VMs, but what will be the performance? You can use a proper SMP machine with 16 sockets, but you are already at half mainframe price and journey-wise, and you’ll be wasting the machine’s capabilities.

marcus0x62 4y ago

Sure, but they way we did that back in the 90’s was very different, and carried a much lower overhead than LPARs in the IBM mainframe world or any hypervisor or container used today — shared hosting “virtualization” in the 90’s was little more than chroot jails, and frequently not even that.

neverartful 4y ago
I think you're confusing LPARS with guests under z/VM. A mainframe LPAR is a coarse-grained (relatively speaking) partitioning of the system. LPARS are created and managed by a Hardware Management Console (HMC), and run on PR/SM [0]. No one creates mainframe LPARS to run a VPS. Those would simply be a guest under z/VM. Realistically speaking, z/VM would be running in an LPAR (less than the whole of the mainframe resources) and then within z/VM's LPAR, z/VM hypervisor allows all of its guests to run concurrently. [0] https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=PR/SM https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=PR/SM
- rbanffy 4y ago
  KVM is also available now in addition to z/VM. The IBM cloud “trusted environments” run on it.
- marcus0x62 4y ago
  >> ... or any hypervisor or container used today ... > I think you're confusing LPARS with guests under z/VM. I am not, but thanks.