I have a machine that is IA64 and it has a spot for PCI cards in it. I was wondering if the PCI cards in it can be just regular PCI cards, or if they have to be PCI cards that were built specifically to work with an IA64 architecture?
We have a spare Integrity blade (2x Tukwila quad-core + 16Gb RAM) laying around which I would like to use has a Virtual Host for a couple of Linux VMs. I am having some concerns finding the best solutions for our situation (if a solution is possible at all?). Here's what I'm dealing with:
- XEN looks well supported on Itanium, but I'm not sure if I would be able to run x86_64 guests on ia64+XEN.
- I guess KVM would be able to support emulation for x86_64 through qemu, but support for ia64 does not seem to be well supported.
- All guests are going to be RedHat 5.5 based and HAVE to be on x86_64 architecture.
- I don't care about the host's distribution (ideally CentOS or Debian), but I would prefer it not being Red Hat (since I don't want to deal with the trouble of registering only for 1 ia64 licence).
- Red Hat drops support for ia64 and Xen in version 6
- Debian seems well supported on ia64 but I can't seem to find kvm or xen packages for it
- Will CentOS also drop support for ia64 and Xen?
So, to sum up my question, how would you guys go about virtualising x86_64 guests on an Itanium server?
One of my customers has a HP Itanium (Integrity Rx6600 I think) box. They want to use it for a running our apps (Linux based). I was initially hoping to put a ESXi on it and load Ubu 10.10 but I was surprised IA64 is declining :
- Windows discontinued support since 2008
- Ubuntu 10.04 is last of support
- CentOS also unsure
- VMWare ESXi not supported
What are people doing ? Are people running Ubuntu 10.04 on Itanium succesfully ? Also FreeBSD 8.2 says supports it - are they going to keep with the platform ?
We are decommissioning a 15 node Itanium cluster.
We don't know what to do with it. Being geeks we want to put it (or its individual nodes) to some cool use, but since it is Itanium we are a bit unsure what that could/would be.
We are not bringing it back as production servers and we are considering giving them away, if anyone wants them.
It's not the most spiffy hardware, but being 2U rack servers they pack an ok amount of cpu and memory, they're about 3 years old perhaps.
Ideas to what runs well on them? Or something one can use them as?
We are looking at a new environment to run our Oracle Database running on SUSE (potentially migrating to RedHat). Our database is approximately 100GB and performs adequately on our current hardware (x86_64) with approximately 6GB of ram allocated to it. We are growing quickly however and will require more performance shortly.
Given the cost of Oracle licenses we would like to maximize the value from each license by choosing the most appropriate CPU to run the software on.
The questions are:
Are there substantial benefits to looking at Itanium or Sparc hardware, are there any drawbacks? Is there a point where one starts to scale out better?
What are the long term support options for Itanium? Given the dominance of x86 would it be safer long term to stick with x86?
On average what would be the performance benefit of implementing an Oracle database on Itanium or Sparc over x86_64? Is this an issue at all or will other factors (IO/RAM) cap out first?
If anyone can point me towards some solid documentation on comparisons between the platforms that provides good case analysis of when to choose which I'm more than happy to accept that as an answer.
Edit:- Added Sparc as an Option as it was previously not considered however with the recent Oracle Sun aquisition seems very relevant.