A short poll about server architectures
Readers, we need you
Tech Panel Reg readers, we're interested in finding out what your server architecture looks like, and how this might map onto what we have uncovered as some of the core challenges. Is it hub-and-spoke, all in one place or highly distributed? Let us know.
READER POLL
COMMENTS
One assumes this includes virtual machines?
We've a bit over 50 Virtual servers at the moment, counting the ones for development and disaster recovery. the rest of our ~50 odd machines are largely parked in a central data center. Due to how one of our critical apps is configured, it runs on dedicated hardware at our branch offices. The majority of the other hardware sits in a data center.
I'll cheerfully admit that VMs are a lot easier to manage and maintain, at least within our environment.
As far as Operating systems- largely windows based, with the odd AIX and AS/400 dinosaurs here and there.
Anon for obvious reasons...
@freeform dynamics folks
I assume that this is asking for the metal boxen we all have? Not OS installs on those boxen? 30 Metal boxen == 150+ server OS installs 'round here...
You forgot OS and architecture
The OS you are running definetely influences a lot into everything from work load to HW-costs. Almost as much as the others combined. Some OSes are easier to maintain than others and it's definetely part of the architecture. Also the architecture was missing completely.
Everybody doesn't use Intel-PC, have you heard? Cheapest of el cheapo, no matter what the price tag says.
We can run 10 to 20 virtual machines in one, not very powerful hardware (rack mounted pc, in this case) as this solution adds only about 10% overhead compared to non-virtualised server.
Compare that to 50-90% of some virtualisation services or Windows, which explicitly forbids running in virtualized environment: One hardware, one machine.
Justifiable as no machine can run 50 parallel windows-instances, even 5 is a lot as we learned from Terminal Server a while ago.
