The sieved virtualisation

Yesterday i´ve wrote about the psychological barrier of accepting the usage of Solaris. Besides of sleeping while my train ride from Berlin to Hamburg (I´ve slept far to less the night before), i´ve came to the solution that the multitude of virtualisation technologies in Solaris is on key to the solution. It´s like a staged sieve: Imagine an Administrator (not these operators, that calls themself admins, but are only capable to follow written operating guidlines), who thinks: “I´ve read so much about ZFS. This would be the solution for a vast amount of problems. And i don´t need this fcking expensive EMC gear. And i like this Fault Management Arcitecture. But i can´t migrate away from Linux, because all my fellow operators want their known linux environment. And controlling wants that i use less power less space in the server room”. Okay, with Solaris this would go like this: Buying a pair of X4600 at start. At first, you would give your fellow administrators a domU under Xen control. And you can start to use the first advantages of Solaris. Fault Management Architecture in conjunction with live migration. Perhaps Solaris Cluster with a cluster agent for XEN. Or an emulated ZFS volume for storing data. After a while, an fellow admin comes to you and says: “Well, i´ve played with Solaris at home. At the end it´s not that different and dtrace and ZFS are fcking cool stuff. But i have this binary-only application for Linux”. Okay … no problem … give the fellow admin an branded Zone. Later the year, the mail server administrator comes to you, and says: “The old mailserver ist 3 years old and starts to make problems. Hey, i can compile Postfix and Cyrus on Solaris. So give me one of your zones, i want to put my mail data on the ZFS data pool. I don´t need all the compatibility layers. I want the pure stuff”. A minute later, the fellow admin goes away with his own root password for his mail-server zone. So the multitude of virtualisation technologies is nothing less than the enabler to the smooth possible way to migrate from Linux to Solaris. So this cascading technologies in one operating system makes really sense