Re: Itanium / Integrity question


"Main, Kerry" <Kerry.Main@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C72D63EB292C9E49AED23F705C61957BDEBA56B1FE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Unless you are running something like VMware, each OS requires dedicated
drive
(or SAN partition).

Good news is that with drives being so cheap these days, this is usually
not an
issue.

With 1 Integrity Dev server, you can support your application on OpenVMS,
Linux,
Windows, HP-UX and other OS's that run on IA64. Simply use separate disks
for
each OS and reboot as required.

(sorry for odd formatting, Kerry's client and mine can't seem to agree on
quoting).

"each OS requires dedicated drive"

Itanium/Integrity may well require a drive per OS. Generic x86 and AMD64
systems do not require a dedicated drive (or SAN partition) per OS. A
dedicated partition is often required. (The dedicated drive is *presumably*
an EFI boot, not Itanium architecture, requirement?? IE do trendy new
EFI-based x86-boxes (Apple ones) also need a drive per OS?)


"with drives being so cheap these days, this is usually not an issue."

Although drive space is cheap these days, many big companies have outsourced
(for better or worse), and storage management is now part of that deal.
Somehow, some outsourcers manage to make storage adds moves and changes many
times more expensive than the storage itself. Maybe this doesn't apply to
desktop boxes, maybe it does, may depend on the local setup. Anyway, for
some unlucky folks, reconfiguring storage today can be just as tedious and
expensive as it was in the days of the RK05 (a 12 inch disk with a whole
2.5MB), just today's units are measured in TB not MB.


"Unless you are running something like VMware"

What is the status of VMware on Itanium these days? Back in 2002/2003, HP
and VMware were talking it up, at least for enterprise class versions and
boxes. Last year (2006), I read that Itanium VMware was no longer happening
(can't find a definitive reference just now but confidence is reasonably
high). A very very quick scan of the VMware website just now doesn't quickly
find anything definitive either way. Regardless of that, real business-class
VMware users know that they don't just need a version of VMware that's
available, for real business use they need one that's been *qualified* on
the chosen platform, ideally one which is going to be actively *supported*
for a reasonable length of time on the chosen platform. A worthwhile number
of x86 and AMD64 boxes are qualified and supported. However, not all
x86/AMD64 boxes come with such qualifications (eg the Unisys x86-based
ES7000(?), rebadged briefly as Proliant 9000, at one stage had VMware
qualified, but it wasn't a VMware version that anybody wanted to use in
anger - it was too old or too new, I forget which, and hence at that time
the P9000/ES7000 was ruled out of much of its target market). Folks who just
want to tinker with VMware can probably find a zero-cost version for x86 or
AMD64 on either Windows or Linux, and when the time comes to take it more
seriously the software is there to buy.


and from others "writing a signature ... safe operation"

Don't know if Windows still does this, but some versions of imaging utility
Ghost want to do it (presumably for licence-auditing purposes), so be
careful if Ghost ever asks you about writing a signature (those probably
aren't the words it uses, but the result is probably the same). My
experience only applies to Ghost for x86; don't know if Itanium has a Ghost
equivalent (maybe the SAN stuff is meant to sort it...).


So to answer Dan's original question, on an Itanium box, it seems you can
readily have more than one OS *installed* at once, given appropriate
storage, but probably will only be able to *run* one OS at once, and VMware
may not help. On an x86/AMD64, different rules apply.

Regards
John


.

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