Don't Throw Away Your Physical Servers Just Yet

should be http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/dont-throw-away-your-physical-servers-just-yet/3232?tag=mantle_skin;content

However, I can save you the bother of reading his entire tirade on the need for virtual machines in the data center by offering this quote from the article.

Quoting:I’m not pessimistic about virtualization, the cloud or server consolidation. But, I am pessimistic about your company’s ability to wean itself off of physical systems.

I hear and read too many complaints about virtualization performance, legacy systems and blah, blah, blah–so much so that I’m saying, OK, maybe you should just keep some of your d*** physical systems on hand to make yourself feel better.

Actually the better reason for keeping physical systems on hand, or even not going Cloud is because neither you nor the cloud prividers have any control over a host of reliability issues that are common to WANs, and have been an issue since the days of Mainframes and Dumb terminals.. everything between the data centre and the client machine. This issue is precisely why cloud providers take no responisbility for the reliability of their "service".

tracyanne,

I agree. I saw that Ken didn't refute your comments on his "Control is Highly Overrated and Overpriced" article. In fact, he agreed with you. Hard to believe he gets paid to write such dubious articles.

It is indeed. ZDNet is , I believe, interested only in the revenue from page views, so, so long as the article gets read and commneted on, it's an earner. The quality, or lack there of, is, I believe irrelevent.

I wrote a response which pretty much tears Ken Hess' article to shreds. It's now on LXer.com at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=152262

Just read your article caitlyn, I'd say you've pretty much nailed it.

Thanks, TA. Sadly it won't stop more nonsense like this being written or some PHBs taking it seriously.

I saw that and thought it was brilliant.

@ albinard

Great link.

Quoting:My response to Mr. Hess is at broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/the-most-ridiculous-article-iv.html.

Nice job, Caitlyn

Quoting:Most Ridiculous Ken Hess Story Ever!

Nonsense I say, on its face this statement defies reason, logic and just good common sense.

How ... how I ask you can anyone enter the hallucinatory world of Ken Hess and retain enough rationality to depict just one story as his worst yet? Can any assertion of objective order be considered as based upon rationality when one enters a verbal swamp? So where does reason have its foundation when attempting to critique the text where one's reason seeps beneath the muck?

I wish the regular readers of LXer forums critiquing Ken Hess' output recall when cornered he resorted to claims his inciting, inaccurate and twisted words were merely humor. Being a practitioner of the latter, albeit a weak one, I recognize the difference between twisted tales that tweak funny bones vs. those hiding from responsibility from the ill effects of spurious words. Ken Hess can be validly recognized for his ability to write enticing one liners that supposedly depict the content of his stories. However, after being burned a few times I imposed a rule upon myself that I suggest others follow, if the story is associated with the text "Ken Hess" - skip it.

As always,

YBT

@albinard, and I always thought they were too stupid.. er wrapped up in their religious fantasies to think of anything that wasn't symbolic, like blowing up a bulding because it represents "western imperialism", how wrong I was... oh it was fiction.

@ta: They crashed planes into buildings for just that reason 10 years ago, if you remember. Never underestimate what religious fanaticism can lead to.

@caitlyn

Quoting:They crashed planes into buildings for just that reason 10 years ago

That's right they symbolicly destroyed the "Western imperialists", by blowing up the buildings. It's not as if they inflicted any real damage to "the West", to do that would require something like what the story describes... destroying genuine infrastructure that "Western Imperialism" depends on.

And yes I do understand the personal suffering of those who were injured, and those who lost loved ones. My point is so far Religious fanaticism, of all stripes, has lead only to acts that are symbolic, and while I don't doubt that it's entirely possible such religious fanatics will have a sufficient grasp of reality to plan and implement an action that is actually effective. I'm more worried about non religious terrorists.

The point of the story is, however, very chilling, as it should be. We must resist the urge to keep all our eggs in too few baskets.

> It's not as if they inflicted any real damage to "the West",

No, we did that all by ourselves. Using those attacks as the excuse, of course. :(

You are correct, TA, the damage they inflicted was more psychological than physical.

Quoting:Never underestimate what religious fanaticism can lead to.

Another LXer thread that touched upon "religious zealotry" was the thread 'Sins? SINS?!?!?!' found at http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/30048/ based upon the LXer piece 'The proprietary sins of an average GNU/Linux user'

More to the point of this particular thread, there HAVE been a handful of "ridiculous" Hess stories by or about this author clustered from about one-and-a-half to two years ago.

E.g., going forward from June, 2009:

- '5 Ways to Decide on a Linux Distribution' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/122138 and including the thread '5 ways to (blindly) decide on a Linux distribution'

- '2009's 10 Worst Linux Distributions' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/122929 and including the thread' 'Hmmm... seems that not enough research here' **

** Please note that khess took the liberty of actually responding within this thread.... unfortunately, mostly to attack his detractors.

- 'Yes, Open Source Licenses DO have a purpose!' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/124349 and including the thread 'Debunking Ken Hess' nonsense'

- 'The 10 Best Linux Distributions of 2009' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/126556 and including the thread 'Even worse than last year.'

- '8 IT Predictions for the New Year' found at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/129605 and including the thread 'What a useless article'

----

Seems that khess has a bit of a past history of writing "nonsense".

Whew Vainrveenr..that's one heck of a list..lol

Quoting:Whew Vainrveenr..that's one heck of a list..lol

And it's not even complete. I remember participating in at least an additional couple of similar LXer threads in which I and several others ridiculed the trolling nature of Mr. Hess' Daniweb articles -- and, at the time, one or two people vowed to just skip his articles in the future.

Update: Now I remember: Back then, I wrote something about Mr. Hess' apparent willingness to trade his credibility and reputation for a few pageviews. It looks like that's still true.

Forgot to mention in this thread that my shop is taking the workloads from some virtualized servers and giving them their own iron to improve performance. That and ditching as much Microsoft IIS for RHEL as possible (another facet of the project) should really help.

Dealing with IIS -- always nice.

If you read my response article I mentioned a customer that virtualized their dev environment to save money (shared hosting VPS) and to get it off the production server where it should never have been in the first place. The developers complained mightily about the resources and speed and wanted more. To get more in a virtualized environment was more expensive than adding another server. Guess what that customer did?

Yep, goodbye virtualization. Hello, physical server #2 for their web environment. It was the most cost effective thing to do.

You guys still crack me up.

@khess, and why not, if I was getting paid to write the cr@p you write I'd be laughing at us too.

> You guys still crack me up.

You know the drill by now Ken. You write good artices, you get compliments. You write trash, you get trashed.

And you laugh all the way to the bank in either case, so what do you have to complain about?

Quoting:You guys still crack me up.

An interesting response. I switched to Linux to 'scratch an itch'. I visit this blog to learn.

Why do you?

I'm going to give Ken some benefit of the doubt here. I think the problem many of us have seen in our own shops regards virtualization going back years where there just wasn't enough CPU or memory dedicated to an intensive computing task.

In one of my workloads, we had a single virtualized system that handled the backend -- building HTML pages with Perl -- as well as the web-server load. Once we got a dedicated build system (still virtualized, or at any rate shared with many other such systems) that was separate from a cluster of web servers, life got more comfortable for writers, readers and admins.

It's not just getting out a virtualization hammer and pounding every task you see, but doing it right and adjusting when it's not working.

Almost all of my problems have little or nothing to do with web-server availability (I wish they were - it would mean more readers ...) and everything to do with database performance and sheer CPU needed to build web pages from those databases.

Ken responded to my article as well. He made himself look all the more silly. He recommended my client go to a VPS rather than a physical server without knowing that this client migrated from a VPS to a physical server. Why? First, it eliminated outages. Second, and best of all, it reduced their costs. They migrated the dev box for the same reason: leasing a physical server costs less than a VPS with the horsepower to meet their needs. I guess cost doesn't matter to Ken. Anyway, go to the link above and you can see my latest exchange with Mr. Hess.

@vainrveenr:

Hey, thanks of reminding us and saving / bookmarking those. Some of those bring back nice memories and a laugh at these dire times.

Hmm, you keep track of everything which passes on LXer, don't you?

Quoting: "... that Windows NT 4.0 system that you just can’t take away must remain physical..."

I'm not in IT, but could this in fact be true? I'm thinking licensing reasons, here.

And maybe even whether it's an option. I'm not clear on how this works. Does "your OS" get "installed" or copied into the cloud, or does the cloud provider provide the OS and license?

What are the relevant restrictions or costs involved in moving an old, depreciated or obsoleted Windows product from the (presumably carefully maintained) old box on your own premises, to a new box or to a virtual instance "in the cloud"?

> ...could this in fact be true? I'm thinking licensing reasons, here.

The current virtualization wave hadn't started yet when NT 4.0 was mothballed, much less when it was released, so I doubt very much it's license covers the matter. If it doesn't, it should be perfectly legal to install it in a virtual machine.

Added: Hmm... I may have to go find a Windows NT 4.0 SP6 license just to check.

Who's running Windows NT 4.0?

The mythical company in Ken Hess' article. If you are running physical servers you must also still be running NT 4.0, donchaknow?

> Who's running Windows NT 4.0?

Since there are still people using Win98, I'm pretty sure you could find someone running an Windows NT 4.0 server somewhere. As long as things work, people tend to leave them alone. And all you normally had to do with NT was reboot it about once a month or so to keep it working.