Thursday Mar 29, 2007
Thursday Mar 29, 2007
Did you know that Solaris Containers has the largest HCL of any server virtualization solution?
Here are three examples:
- Solaris 10 HCL: 790 x86/x64 systems + 75 SPARC systems = 865 total systems (March 28, 2007)
- VMware: 305 x86/x64 systems (March 21, 2007)
- Xen publishes specific component requirements (e.g. "1.5GHz single CPU minimum") instead of an HCL
Is that metric relevant? Many factors should affect your virtualization choice. One of them is hardware choice: "does my choice of server virtualization technology limit my choice of hardware platform?"
The data points above show sufficient choice in commodity hardware for most people, but Containers maximizes your choice, and only Containers is supported on multiple hardware architectures.
Yours is a great point.
Will the same hold true from a hardware standpoint for Xen enabled Solaris 10, and Xen domains running Solaris 10? And if so, Xen enabled SLES 10 and RHAS 5 will have the same HCL for Xen as for their standard kernels.
However, the last time I checked Solaris 10's HCL exceeded RHAS 4 and SLES 9, and was far ahead of SLES 10 (and wherever RHAS 5 will be), so Solaris 10 will still lead the pack.
Posted by Mark on March 29, 2007 at 01:36 PM EDT #