Price of Virtual Computing
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Price of Virtual ComputingSoftware pricing is sure to annoy lots of customers no matter what you do. I certainly don't envy the software companies that have to try and decide how to price something that can be copied and used on another machine with no real additional cost to the consumer other than some arbitrary license.
But software licensing is here to stay and we have to deal with it. And it's always changing, especially with the new virtual computers that you can setup on your servers. Recently Microsoft changed their policy with regard to vritaul licensing. They've always allowed people running datacenter edition of Windows to put as many virtual instances as they want on the server, but now they've changed their policy to allow up to 4 instances of Windows on the same PC.
It's a pretty fair deal I think, and something that's much more generous than other proprietary software vendors. Much like their per socket CPU licensing, I think this policy is more generous than most other schemes.
I still think the IBM usage model makes great sense, especially as we get OSes that can handle real time hot additions and subtractions of memory and CPUs. The challenge there is to build some model that doesn't make your company look like a used car sales organization.
Steve Jones
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Well I can't say that I know where this is all going, but I'll comment on how it's affecting the way I work. First, I'm not a DBA, I just do a lot of DBA kind of stuff as a software developer on dev databases before they are turned over to production
That said, all my development is done on a virtual computer with a complete set of development tools installed to assure nothing is missing from the VPC for that project. The dev database usually resides there as well as the development tools and code. The individual VPC for that project is saved forever... To be used later if required for debugging or adding features.
Yesterday, I had a JTA (jump through your a$$) request to make a PLC interface for an off shore project that is needed by next week. My first step was to setup a new VPC for the project. I used a copy of an existing VPC, removed all stuff used on that project and began putting together the necessary tool box for the new project. It took about 5 hours, but I used most of that time to come up to speed on the new requirements while doing maintenance on the VPC. Yes, dear, the new VPC requires removing stuff, adding stuff, defragging, writing 0's to all deleted files, and shrinking the VPC to about 5 GB in this case. All the maintenance is required to get the VPC ready for the new project and to keep the VPC files as small as possible.
When I'm finished, one of my coworkers will take a copy of the VPC with him to the job site when he installs my code. He has to be there for other reasons, but if my project fails for any reason we both have an exact duplicate of the development enviorenment. Hopefully a few phone calls later, the bugs will be fixed and I don't have to fly thousands of miles to look at the problem.
As for production, I just finished a project where we replaced 3 physical servers with 1 physical server and 5 Virtual Servers. This was done to keep the old version of the web site on line and available to the client, while giving them the new web site to use and tweak as they see fit. All 5 VS's function as follows: Old Web Server, New Web Server, Database Server, Application Server, and SAS Server.
I've got to say, I'm loving the virtual computer world!!!
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