Posts by Trevor_Pott 6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010
"What is going to cause people to suddenly start buying a lot more Cisco?"
Legislation that makes other "value for dollar"++ competitors illegal. That, and Cisco will soon be able to deliver a complete Cisco-branded stack covering everything you need in the modern datacenter. So they'll get the service revenue once they move on to the C) Extinguish: phase of the standards game.
Not very, as in most major NA cities you need to get a permit to protest. (Or at the very least, keep the cops informed of time/date, leave a contact person with them who can help the cops round up anyone who breaks the law, etc.) More to the point, the majority of Anonymous isn't behind this in any way, so there isn't going to be a huge turnout.
I suspect that you may be an idiot. One person "cutting ties" with China or the USA doesn't affect a goddamned thing. All it does is serve to put that person at a disadvantage. The same is true of one entire nation. For such a thing to have an effect it must be done as a power bloc.
The reasons are many. The first and most obvious is that economies the size of China or the USA won't notice the lack of contribution of a single individual and will barely notice the lack of contribution of an entire nation. Secondly, so long as other nations respond to political and economic pressure from these "superpower" nations, then any nation which tries to take an ethical stand can (and will) find themselves on the wrong end of an economic blockade from the current western power bloc.
If the majority of western nations were to band together and sever ties with the US, China and Russia they would survive the attempt, economically, at least. I would per perfectly willing to participate in such an event, cutting all my personal economic ties with those nations, no matter how hard that would be, or how much sacrifice it would entail.
But what purpose does it serve to do so unilaterally? I will accomplish nothing by doing so and I will also remove any chance I have of obtaining the financial or political capital required to see my ideals considered, let alone made manifest.
What I preach is a federated economic union of civilized powers that embed ethics and international cooperation as a foundational principle in what would ultimately be a new form of government. The USA, China and Russia would never be a part of such an entity because they cannot unilaterally exert power over it. Thus I would say "leave them behind and move humanity forward."
That isn't related in any way to one individual's purchase choices. They are so completely and utterly disconnected in scope and scale that to call the lack of one hypocrisy in relation to the other demonstrates nothing more spite on behalf of the accuser.
For the record, I do choose products from civilized nations wherever possible. I'm entirely willing to pay more in order to support the economies of nations whose politics I agree with. My segregation isn't absolute, however, I am in fact working towards such a goal.
Said personal economic choice has nothing to do with my belief in how nations should act at scale. They are different beasts entirely. When I choose who I buy from I am choosing based on my personal ethics. It imposes nothing on anyone else. It is my choice, and I alone bear the consequences of that choice.
Acting at a national level, everything is different. The ethics of the individual are completely fucking irrelevant at that scale. What matters is security and stability. Security of resources, stability of economy, stability of relations and security of your people.
This is best achieved by having strong relationships with rationally-run countries that behave in a predictable and honourable manner, presuming, of course, that your nation is also a rationally-run nation that behaves in a predictable and honourable manner. "Surprises" don't go down well on the international scene. Change needs to be slow, multilateral and controlled. There is no room for cowboys.
A strong international federation of nations that has a codified foreign policy, trans-national law and courts, codified admittance and ejection policies, harmonized economic policy and so on and so forth...this is where strength comes from. With the possible exception of Russia, no nation - not even Canada - has all the resources required to survive in the modern world. No nation - not even the almighty US of A - has a military capable of defending against all foes.
Most importantly, no human being - not a single fucking one of us - has the knowledge to predict the results of interfering in the natural development of other nations. Far too much (if not most) of the tragedy in human history has stemmed from the inability of our many and varied leaders to resist the urge to meddle.
The ethics of international cooperation and foreign policy have fuck all to do with personal likes or dislikes. They have everything to do with learning from our fucking mistakes and applying that knowledge to better governing our nations. The ethics of nations is about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, not the desires of the one influencing only that one.
I preach and advocate evidence-based legislation and a union of nations who can and will adhere to that concept. I believe that we need to be cautious and cooperative in our international endeavors. I believe also that we cannot let other nations push us around to suit their agenda; we need to have strong enough ties within our power bloc to say "no" to nations like the USA who refuse to play nicely with others.
Playing nicely involves things like recognizing, and ratifying participation in international courts. It involves adhering to terms of treaties, even when they don't suit your current political goals. (E.G. the terms of the NAFTA treaty are not merely a means to economically cripple Canada and Mexico, they also impose restrictions on the US that is must adhere to.)
I don't preach anti-Americanism, no matter how hard that may be for you to comprehend. Nor do I preach anti-Russianism or anti-Chinaism. I preach global legal harmonization, recognition and enforcement of human rights and a strict limit to the power of corporations and politicians.
When the US is ready to ratify international courts, abide by it's treaties, address it's wealth gap, and start addressing the power imbalance of it's society (starting with Citizens United) then I think it would make a wonderful addition to any international community. The USA is filled with amazingly good people who try to do great things. It just isn't mature enough as a nation to play with others internationally in a rational, predictable and globally advantageous manner.
If you cannot see the difference between personal choice in sourcing products and a desire to build a better a more stable world at the scale of international interactions then I must return to my original statement: you're an idiot.
Edit: as a side note, I loathe traveling into the US. With very few exceptions, I don't do it simply "for business" and I would never do it "for shopping." (Seriously?) When I go into the US it is because people I like and/or care about have asked me to do so. I don't go to VMworld or Spiceworld "because of business." I go to meet human beings that I believe are good people. I would love it if they all came here to hang out, but it is those events that they choose to attend, and it makes sense for me to go so I can meet up with as many of them as possible all in one go.
"and you'll be better off if we're on your side rather than being "neutral""
No, we won't. The USA does far more harm than good. It is a destabilizing and deleterious presence. Western nations would be far stronger if the USA simply wasn't there.
I would far prefer that civilized nations simply cut off all ties with the USA, Russia and China. The rest of the developed world could federate and work together towards common cause; there's nothing any of those nations has that we explicitly need. Let the poxy whoresons annihilate eachother, or sink eachother into some godawful economic depression. I don't care.
Until a nation is ready to play with others as equals then the rest of the world simply shouldn't interface with them. None of us have the knowledge and experience to play god; we shouldn't go interfering in their culture, or attempting to "advance" them (technologically or culturally) artificially. Each nation needs to find the patch towards international cooperation and peace on their own.
The rest of the developed (and developing) world combined has more than enough resources to build a strong defense force and a self-sufficient economy. We just don't need barbarians.
So to hell with the WTO. To hell with globalization and the infrastructure of American economic imperialism. It's time to form a true international federation for mutual economic and defensive benefit, where rules regarding interference in other nations and acceptance of other nations into the bloc are codified at the outset.
P.S. don't you dare trot out "our boys died to save your asses" yankee patriot bullshit. My ancestors bled and died same as yours. The threat was global; all nations were at risk. If I recall correctly your nation not only was late to the party, they seriously considered joining up with the bad guys for both world wars.
Besides, however brave your antecedents may heave been, the USA today is an emphatically shitty copy of that proud nation that existed then. If your ancestors were alive, they'd kick you in the crotch and leave you in agony on the floor for the sheer hubris of thinking that the corrupt oligachy of today's America is even a pale shadow of the nation that created a generation of men who understood the concept "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
Lest we forget. There is a reason this saying is tied to an international holiday. Your nation has forgotten the very important lessons that are tied to those three words. And for that reason I am not "thankful" for the US of A. I'm fucking terrified of you bastards; far more so than Putin's KGB Mafiosos or China's rush towards a stable middle class.
I do entirely take issue with your asinine assertion that "the Democrat Party is the Trial Lawyer Party" is a " factual statement". This is false. Both of the American political parties are equally in bed with trial lawyers and equally infested by them at all levels.
This is not a "slight political statement" by you at all. It is indicative of significant bias. Your followup post merely confirms it. You are not an objective observer of USian politics and thus aren't going to be able to suggest workable solutions that solve systemic issues because your view of the world is blinkered by partisan politics.
Also, for the record, "you've managed to elect a totally incompetent narcissist to the Presidency not just once but twice" is utterly false. My country doesn't have a President. Though I note that the US's past two presidents would be easily described by your chattering inanity.
Perhaps you need a lie down.
"But since the Trial Lawyers' Party controls the White House and the Senate"
Oh get over yourself. The Republicans are just as made up of MBAs and lawyers as the Democrats. And they are all as guilty of compromising their ethics over government pork and campaign donations as the next guy.
The differences between the parties boil down to this:
Extremist Republicans would have the US enslaving non-whites, evicting foreigners, women barefoot and pregnant, sex education was taboo, science was banned, homosexuals were murdered and contraception equated with witchcraft. English would be the official language and some flavor of protestantism the official religion.
Extremist Democrats would have the US living as an agrarian society where births were highly regulated (to control population), science banned (it's not "natural" or "organic"), wealth redistribution would be dialed up to 11 and men would be "paying" for the sins of other people's grandfathers for generations to come.
Both are batshit fucking crazy, and both groups of extremists would spend themselves into a debt hole that would make the extant problems the US faces look quaint.
In the middle, however, you find the majority of Americans. These are people that, on average, are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. They want to see the wealth gap narrow, but not to the point of guaranteeing equality of outcome at the point of a gun. They want to see the government debt dealt with, but not with such drastic action that it results in a reset of quality of life for the average American back to the 1930s.
Average Americans just don't give a flying fuck about sexuality, religious choice, country of origin or so on and so forth. Other people can be who they want to be; what matters to the average American is that they have a good job, a reasonable expectation of financial stability in the future and that they leave a better world to their children than the one they themselves were born into.
Both parties are corrupted by the extremists. The extremists are - by their very nature - willing to put a lot more time and money into convincing everyone of their cause. That means placating the extremists heads off a great many problems early on and it ultimately becomes the focus of every party and every individual campaign.
The problem is that extremists are allowed a disproportionate voice. This gets to party financing, political advertisements and more. Regular people - who are by default fairly apathetic - can't have their voices heard amongst the din.
They also - at least in the USA - don't have a choice. Both parties are completely batshit crazy. There is no "Sanity party of America" that provides a centrist view. There is no party to go to in the USA for people who are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. Hell, that's rare in almost any western nation.
People corrupt. That means special interests worm their way into the heart of all political parties, especially when the money is allowed to flow completely freely. A newly emerged party would be no different from the established parties, because the fundamental mechanisms that cause the imbalance of voices is never being addressed.
Thus your lawyers - and hollywood, oil and gas, argibusiness, big pharma, etc - are all over both parties like a bad stain on the back of one's undies. Lawyers don't court "just the Democrats", because that would be idiotic, and lawyers are anything but. You go after both parties so that regardless of which one wins, you win. That is how every single lobbyist on earth plays it.
Additionally, those professions which attract the power-hungry to begin with (such as lawyers) will ultimately vomit forth political candidates at all levels of government and for all parties at roughly the same rate. This is because most political candidates don't stand for anything. They merely crave power. Thus they will work with any party that will have get them elected and push any agenda or platform they feel will get them elected.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are (on the whole) heroes or idealogues. Some are, but damned few on either side.
What should stand out is that this isn't the case everywhere. There are a hell of a lot more idealogues in Canadian politics (as one example) as well as Nordic politics and even German politics than there are in the US or the UK. (Though Canada's new election laws are having a dramatic effect on the reduction of ideologues at all levels.)
So, blame not a given party, or even a given pressure group. The system in that nation is irrevocably fucked. Only some very dramatic overhauls can set things right...but the power climate is such that it make take a revolution for that to happen.
The day Citizens United is thrown out is the day the wheels start turning back towards the people. I fear that will not come within my lifetime.
"Is that a good outcome, if two companies conspiring to avoid poaching were both driven into bankruptcy, so that all the workers who had their salaries pushed down now become jobless and probably can't recover the bulk of the fine due to that bankruptcy?"
Yes. It's called "setting an example." They do it with proles often enough, and they set laws for individuals such that they are punitive to the point of ruinous all the time. (See: $100k+ for torrenting a single MP3.)
The idea here is deterrence. Corporations do not have morality. They can only be dissuaded from behaviors through deterrence. A slap on the wrist is not deterrence. It isn't enough to cause a shareholder revolt, executive firings and other dramatic and drastic repercussions that will ultimately make those who run companies think twice before breaking the law.
Personally, I'd put a contingency in the law to attempt to mitigate bankruptcy problems, but I think it is perfectly acceptable to drive a company out of business if it breaks the law, especially when the law they are breaking affects many individuals. Examples would be cartel behavior, abuse of monopoly position, conspiracy to depress wages or externalizing costs of manufacture by destroying the environment.
A) Ensure that when a company is driven out of business due to deterrence-class lawsuits the administrator for the company's bankruptcy procedures can go after the executives and board members. Make piercing the corporate veil a hell of a lot easier when the decisions taken (and the laws broken) are more than just incidental infractions of procedure and bureaucracy.
My standard for such a judgement would be this: if a regular citizen would go to jail for the act(such as murder, environmental destruction, etc) - or for defrauding an equivalent number of people out of an equivalent amount of money (cartel behavior, wage depressing, etc) - that the corporate veil can be pierced.
B) Stipulate in damages calculations that any damages calculation that has a reasonable chance of driving the company to bankruptcy be put before court appointed experts such that they can determine a reasoned balance between the maximum % of the penalty originally awarded and keeping the company from bankruptcy.
If the damages assessed are such that only a minute fraction of the damages would be paid out in order to stave off bankruptcy then the company should be placed into administration and as much of the company sold off as possible to both meet it's extant debt obligations and the settlement obligations, even if that means wrapping up the endeavor altogether.
C) In the event that a company will be driven to bankruptcy or wrapped up completely as the result of such actions there should be a pre-designed social safety net to help employees transition. I'm not talking welfare here - which is mostly aimed at helping people through longer term economic downturns - but a form of employment insurance that is more short term and tactical and aimed squarely at helping the people who lost their job in the bankrupting company get a job at the company that will be filling the void.
The above isn't perfect. There's gaps that people smarter than me need to think on, correct and expand on...but the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the executives...or the shareholders. Corporations are given too much leniency, especially when it comes to actions that affect thousands or even millions of people. The status quo does society a disservice. It needs to be altered. I believe that alteration needs to be rather dramatic.
I care what J.H. thinks. Thus your statement is incorrect. In fact, I can name at least 250 (probably more, if I think about it) members of the VMware community alone that would consider themselves "fans" of J.H., including at least a dozen CEOs. I have been asked to arrange introductions come VMworld between J.H. and some of these folks, so I'm pretty sure that the apathy (or in your case outright hostility) is limited to a fairly narrow(minded) subset of the readership.
Edit: and just to make sure I get a nice Ad Hom in here to keep the average low...while J.H. may make the odd very human error in his writing, your ceaseless bellyaching has left me with only one inescapable conclusion regarding this whole issue: you, sir, are uncompromisingly inferior.
"Sorry, Trevor, but I'm really struggling to see how anyone can design a protocol that is resistant against people just ignoring the protocol and doing something else."
It's very simple. You accept the proposals that were repeatedly submitted for incorporating NAT officially into the spec. At the very least Prefix translation NAT, but NAPT66 as required for various emergencies. You put aside the end-to-end religion and you focus on reality.
The issue here is that actual solutions to the problems encountered were proposed. They were rejected because they broke end-to-end. End-to-end has become a religion. It is in the way of solving real problems. Smart people with credentials are proposing solutions. The hivemind says no.
"Actually I'd hold your judgement on that. We (as in end-users) haven't really tried that yet. As IPv4-fixated ISPs try increasingly unfriendly options (like CGN) to postpone that job they don't want to do, customers (largely isolated from the problem until very recently) may start to take an interest and, then, letting the market sort itself out may prove to be a perfectly reasonable way forward. We're told that the backbone is already IPv6-friendly, and modern OSes are certainly happy to use it. ISPs and their bundled routers are really the only sticking point and in many parts of the world there is competition in that market."
That is exactly the sort of airy-fairy "hope"-based thinking that has driven the IPv6 theologists from day one. It hasn't happened yet. It is extremely unlikely to happen in the future. The belief that people will pressure their ISPs and device vendors into behaving is based on the idea that humans are rational actors. People are not rational actors. Every single piece of economic theory based around that ridiculous idea is false and doomed to failure.
What people will start doing is paying money for IPv4 addresses. They will also start using NAT with IPv6 and damned be the nerds that cry "no!". It is happening today. It will continue to happen in the future.
The idea that end customers give a rat's ass about the end-to-end model was patently ridiculous from the start adn that hasn't changed one whit. In fact, in a post-Snowden world, there are a lot of people who are nearly violently opposed to the end-to-end model for any number of reasons. There will be no grassroots revolution demanding ISPs and device vendors get their shit together and properly support IPv6 protocol spec in order to make the end-to-end-model possible.. Nobody except the religious ivory tower elite and lazy developers who loathe having to actually engage brain and think about NAT when designing applications cares.
Market pressures will not force ISPs and device vendors to conform on IPv6, they'll force developers to design applications that work with IPv6 NAT. ISPs and device vendors are so powerful they dictate terms to end customers, not vice versa. That dynamic will not change within my lifetime.
Developers, on the other hand, are cheap and disposable. For every recalcitrant douche who refuses to write their IPv6 application to cope with NAT there are 10,000 more willing to write a similar app that will. End customers do dictate to developers. That's where the fold will occur.
"Then you could avoid a number of pointless and vapid arguments by criticising your ISP and device manufacturere in future rather than IPv6. Remarks like "How does IPv6 handle these scenarios?" lead the naive reader to believe you are blaming the protocol."
I am blaming the protocol. Many of us have been saying for well over a decade that exactly this was going to happen, despite protestations of the ivory tower elite. Shock of fucking shocks, the shit we warned about actually came to pass.
It is the job of engineers to design for the real world, not to create religions and ideologies and expect the world to conform.
The protocol should have been designed such that it would take into account that A) device vendors are not going to put even the faintest bit of effort into creating devices that do more than the bare minimum and B) ISPs will not all "follow the rules" and assign whole prefixes. This was mentioned SEVERAL times by people far more important and well credentialed than me.
The response of the ivory tower types? "The community must pressure these organizations into compliance." That was a spectacularly stupid plan for dealing with these issues and it didn't fucking work.
So, I have two options: I can cripple myself and the companies I support by trying to support a religious ideal of "end-to-end" that I don't actually believe is all that important (things work just fine without honouring that today), or I can say "fuck the theologists", break the spec and have shit Just Work.
I choose the latter.
To my understanding radvd still requires the systems ask for new IPs when a change occurs. In an IPv4 world, I never have to have my internal systems change anything, ask for a change, restart, hup or whatever. The external IP changes but the internal IP stays the same. Everything behind the firewall continues to work *exactly* as it was before, with zero administration. All that changes is the edge device (which picks up that the IP address changeover has occurred) and DNS (driven dynamically by the edge device.)
Now, I could try mucking about with prefix validity lifetimes, but then I'm still changing the IP address that the applications on that system see. There's all sorts of applications that need restarts to handle address changes and that's very, very bad.
The solution, of course is using ULAs with 1:1 NPTv6 or Map66 at the edge.
Ivory tower types my not like that we all have 30+ years of legacy cruft to drag around, but fuck them in the face with a rototiller. I couldn't care less. We do have 30+ years of legacy cruft and that isn't going away.
Applications don't like having their IP addresses changed. That means that you either have to set up the application for all possible IP addresses (and defend all possible IP addresses) before the app starts. Frankly, this is often not possible in cases where you are trunking in a second ISP to handle load changes or ahead of a known outage/changing contracts/etc.
Alternately, you have to restart your apps every time a change occurs. That's just flat out unacceptable.
Radvd doesn't solve these problems. All it can let you do is assign new global IPs to your systems when a change occurs, assuming that the stars align right and the things actually handle multi-IP stacks properly, actually honour route expiration and so forth.
Load balancing, as you said, requires NAT. I don't think the future is overloading NAT as we have in the IPv4 world, unless you live in Canada where the ISPs are douchecanoes that don't hand out prefixes. (May they burn in the eternal fires of their own greed.)
At a minimum you are going to do 1:1 prefix translation NAT to get proper load balancing, which is exactly what I use and advocate, and something that makes the ivory tower nerds' heads explode in an ideological rage.
To them, end-to-end is a religious concept that takes precedence over ease of use, profitability, manageability and even common sense. They will attack your professionalism, question your parentage and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd just shank you in the street with a sharpened toothbrush for having the temerity to suggest that "horrible internet breaking kludges" like 1:1 prefix NATing are required in the real world.
I can't stand those fascist wastes of carbon. I would not shed a tear if each and every last one of them get cholera and shit themselves to death. We wouldn't be in this mess, requiring "kludges" like prefix NAT if they had removed head from sphincter at any point in the multi-decade development of the IPv6 protocol to acknowledge the actual functional reality of the world in which the protocol - and the applications that use it - must actually function.
The network will adapt to serve the needs of the applications that make the business money. The business will not adapt to serve the desires of the people designing the protocol. That's life, and the ivory tower types need to fucking deal with it.
My ISP doesn't hand a prefix. It only hands off individual IPv6 addresses to devices directly connected to the modem*. Nothing else.
No other ISPs offer IPv6 to end customers at all here.
Even if I could get prefixes, what if I want to dual-home, or to switch from one ISP to another? The end-customer and SMB ISPs don't offer BGP to us, and that's assuming we're even trained to handle such a thing. I can buy dual-port IPv4 routers that do load balancing and failover and don't require me to renumber my entire network to accomplish it every time there's a failover.
How does IPv6 handle these scenarios? Hmm?
I'm deeply interested, because all I get from the ivory tower types it "sit on it and rotate, those scenarios don't matter, prole."
My response to them is "your end-to-end doesn't matter, assclown" followed by IPv6 NAT. When the protocol is ready to meet my needs then I'll use it as designed. Until then, fucks given about ideological purity of the protocol = 0.
*I don't care if you want to "blame my ISP." Eat 10,000 sacks of wiggling phalluses if that's your response. There are no choices of ISP for the end customer. What the ivory tower douchepopsicles have failed to comprehend from day one is that the ISPs dictate terms to customers, not the other way around. And the ISPs give zero fucks about anything except how to extract the most possible money. I don't care about what the spec is, or how it's intended. Only how it is actually used and what's available to me. Both from ISPs and from device vendors. Everything else is masturbation of the most pointless and vapid variety.
"I suspect the resistance I often observe regarding IPv6 addressing, loathing of SLAAC, and devotion to DHCP, is fundamentally Calvinistic."
No, it has everything to do with wanting control over out own networks and endpoints. Even little things like "renumbering" in failover or dual-homing scenarios for SMBs that don't have BGP. We don't care what ivory tower intellectuals want. We want functional, cheap, secure and private. IPv4 does that now. IPv6 destroys it.
"Yep - that seems most likely to me too. Windows Phone is already selling more than Apple iPhones in 16 territories."
Poverty tier territories. How is it against Android and Symbian in the same places? Or against "nothing at all?"
Windows Phone: the mobile OS where you have to give a really long think about using it, even when the alternative is "nothing at all."
"Dude, what the hell do you think Motorola is going to do; you think they're sitting under some huge mountain, cracking their knuckles as their evil plan to trick users into divulging information which is on the hardware of Motorola phones already bears fruit?"
Yes. There's no money in shipping hardware; or most software, for that matter. The real money is in advertising. Do I believe that Moto - and every other tech company out there - want to know where I am and what I am doing 24/7/365? Absofuckinglutely. That's big money, and they'd be doing a disservice to their shareholders if they didn't attempt to scrape and sell it.
"Again, you assert "worst case" that is, to be blunt...dated. I run huge databases virtualised all the time. Ones that pin the system with no ill effects and no noticeable difference to metal."
Whatever happened to your previous statement that it is only by pushing the system to the redline that we learn tings? Which of the two assertions isn't true? :)
I don't see a contradiction. I pin my systems. In testing and in real-world workloads. I believe it is absolutely required. What i don't believe in - and let's be perfectly clear here - is finding edge case scenarios that don't work and brandishing them as a reason to avoid a technology in all instances. If there are edge case scenarios or configurations that don't work, let's find them and then either fix the issue or not use the technology for that application.
That said, I can - and do - push my systems to the redline with my workloads and I do not see the results you see. That says to me that your results are dependent on your config and your workload. Thus I cannot use your scenario as a generic "virtualisation imposes a huge penalty" catch-all, nor can I extrapolate from the fact that you encountered a high-overhead scenario to state categorically that this is why something like "virtualised server SANs" are a bad idea.
"losing 40% of performance would also crank up your costs by a similar amount. That's not an insignificant hit to the bottom line."
I agree, losing 40% of performance is a big hit. That said, my experience from both synthetic lab testing and real-world results do not show a 40% hit, or anywhere near. Closer to 6% for redline workloads with 4% being the average.
4-6% falls into the "perfectly acceptable tradeoff for convenience" category for me. Again: I cannot accept your "40%" assertion without testing, and thus I will use my own numbers for the time being (and the workloads that I am aware of) and say "virtualisation is a great technology with a more than acceptable tradeoff."
"But the most important point I would like to make is this: "Don't listen to my numbers - produce your own based on your workload." By all means, use my methodology if you deem it appropriate, and/or point out the flaw in my methodology. But don't start with the assumption that the marketing brochure speaks the unquestionable truth. Start with a null hypothesis and go from there. Consensus != truth, and from what you said I think we both very much agree on this."
When have I ever accepted consensus on anything? Point me to an article where this has occurred. I test things all the time. It's my job. If I disagree with your take on virtualisation it's because your numbers not only aren't close to mine, they're in a different postal code.
I don't have a chip on my shoulder about virtualisation, or metal, or really any technology. Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or another. What I am saying is the following:
1) Your numbers have to be reproduced before they can be believed
2) Determination of how relevant your workloads are to real-world workloads as run by, well, anyone has to be made.
3) If you can evidence reproducible workloads that show 40% virtualisation overhead then there are people at VMware that will want to see this, reproduce it themselves and solve the problem by making a better hypervisor. I know many of them. They're good people.
In my experience, virtualisation is between 4% and 6% overhead for every workload I've tried. If you've workloads outside that range, I consider them an exception. An interesting one, worthy of investigation, discussion and remediation, but until we get more widespread testing on various workloads to see where they fall between my experience and your own I simply don't have enough data to kybosh hypervisors as a concept.
Again, you assert "worst case" that is, to be blunt...dated. I run huge databases virtualised all the time. Ones that pin the system with no ill effects and no noticeable difference to metal. I also strongly disagree with your assertion that you cannot give up an erg of performance in the name of convenience; that may be your personal choice, it certainly isn't mine.
As for "running virtualised causing a substantial overhead on memory I/O" I have maintained this particular item for some time. Specifically that "features" within most hypervisors to optimize RAM usage create a dramatic overhead on the system and they need to be weeded out. There is also the issue that many virtualised systems = many OSes caching to RAM. This changes the game versus each system having it's own dedicated setup, more than CPU sharing, I believe.
Databases used to be a big problem on hypervisors. 3-4 years ago. We've come a long since then, and it's only the true edge cases that still show issues. That said, isolating an edge case enough to reproduce it on modern equipment and hypervisors is always a fun exercise.
So if I seem skeptical, that's why. You write like someone who did a bunch of testing in the ESXi 4 era, went "pfaugh, virtualisation" and then put up a "get off my lawn" sign until the end of time. 2-4 years ago, I wouldn't have put a gigantic 100GB DB2 instance in a hyeprvisor. Today? Not a problem. Oracle still gives me shit...but that's Oracle. MSSQL doesn't bat an eye about being virtualised and Pervasive runs like a dog no matter what you stuff it into.
MySQL can be tuned to run in anything. I have virtualised instances that work fine, others don't. I haven't, however, seen a different to metal worth writing about in years.
Now, maybe my databases are "poorly optimized." They certainly are I/O bound in the extreme. That said, I test with real-world workloads, not theoretical constructs. As I said above, I'd love to assemble a lab with a real-world workload that can reproduce what you're saying. It sounds fun to explore.
That said, if I seem skeptical, please bear in mind that your discussion does mirror any of dozens of conversations with some rather closed-minded anti-virtualistion folks that can't let go of stuff from the beforetime and look at what is on the table now.
Thus testing. IT should be about the numbers, not about religion. Not for you, me, or anyone. Ultimately, that was the point of the article I wrote: there's too much religion in IT. From marketing and sales to even the phoney baloney whitepapers many companies knock together.
Let's get down to the testing. Reproducible results that we can then determine applicability, market impact, use cases and so forth. That's the information needed to properly advice clients. :)
"On the subject of leaving resources dedicated to the host/hypervisor, that is all well and good, but if you are going to leave a core dedicated to the hypervisor, then that needs to be included in the overhead calculations, i.e. if you are running on a 6-core CPU, and leaving one core dedicated to the hypervisor, you need to add 17% to your overhead calculation."
I never said "leave a core dedicated to the hypervisor". I said reserve it some space. Typically 500Mhz or so.
As for this:
"the I/O saturation was a non-issue because the write caching was enabled, the data set is smaller than the RAM used for testing, and the data set was primed into the page cache by pre-reading all the files (documented in the article). The iowait time was persistently at 0% all the time."
I would have to conduct my own testing. My lab results consistently show an ability to saturate RAM bandwidth on DDR2 systems. Your results smell like an issue with RAM bandwidth, especially considering that's where you're pulling your I/O. I will look to retry by placing the I/o on a Micron p420M PCI-E SSD instead.
I also disagree with your assessment regarding near/far cores on NUMA setups. Just because the hypervisor can obfuscate this for guest OSes doesn't mean you should let it do so for all use cases. If and when you have one of those corner case workloads where it is going to hammer the CPUs ina highly parallel fashion with lots of shared memory between then you need to start thinking about how you are assigning cores to your VMs.
Hypervisors can dedicate cores. They can also assign affinity in non-dedicated circumstances. So when I test something that I know is going to be hitting the metal enough to suffer from the latency of going across to fetch memory from another NUMA node I start restricting where that workload can play. Just like I would in production.
Frankly, I'd also start asking pointed questions about why such workloads are running on a CPU at all, and can't I just feed the thing a GPU and be done with it?
I flatten my systems all the time, not just in testing, but in production. I run full-bore render engines in a virtualised environment and I just don't see the issues you describe. That makes me very curious where the tipping point between my workloads and your simulation is. What needs to change in order to experience this dramatic drop in capability? Do I need to be on the lookout for it in my future workloads, or is it an artifact of using an ancient CPU or a peculiar testing configuration.
I don't have answers to these, but I've added it to the list of things to find out.
@Gordan; yup, I had missed it. In my defense, I hadn't slept in 4 days due to datacenter migration.
Let's address a few issues in the testing methodology you state:
"1) Testing is done by fully saturating the machine."
Testing should always be done by pushing the machine to the red line, otherwise we learn nothing.
"2) Not leaving any cores "spare"."
Leaving cores "spare" doesn't present a real test. However, the host instances should have reserved RAM and CPU on any production virtualisation deployment. It's a fairly common mistake not to enable this, and typically results in Xen/KVM showing badly compared to properly deployed instances. The hosts instances need wiggle room to do their jobs, especially with "noisy" VMs.
3) Pinning cores helps, especially in cases like the Core2 which has 2x2 cores, which means every time the process migrates, the CPU caches are no longer primed.
I pin cores all the time and never run into the issues you describe here. I have flattened multiple generations of systems and still don't see the disparity you do. What I wonder is if it is related to the Core 2.
Back in the Core 2 days I used AMD stuff, and they were well ahead of Intel in terms of hardware virtualisation support. Today's processors have any number of improvements over that old design and the introduction of proper hardware support in these generations of processors may explain the discrepancy.
The only time I have ever seen results like you describe is when I am able to saturate the RAM bandwidth. This is entirely possible with DDR 2 systems, especially when you are allowing memory deduplication on the systems, something that - at least in ESXi - is enabled by default.
I'd also have to look at your I/O subsystems as being suspect. It smell a lot like I/O thrashing. I will see if I can scrape together any equipment from that era and place it against both the AMD Shanghai systems I have as well as my modern Intel Xeons. I am very curious to see what will happen when I pin them.
Hey; took a brief look at this, and noticed a few problems straight away. First up:
"(VMware Player 4.0.4, Xen 4.1.2 (PV and HVM), KVM (RHEL6), VirtualBox 4.1.18)"
Only Xen and KVM are hypervisors, and they are the two that are the easiest to tune improperly. You don't have ESXi or Hyper-V here, and they are the real test of what virtualisation can do. VMware Player and VirtualBox are not hypervisors...or at least not Type 1 hypervisors. There is going to be a huge penalty for running those. Everyone in the industry knows that. That's why they aren't advocated for production anything.
I am really shocked you got such bad numbers for Xen and KVM, which leads to me wonder how they were configured...but being Xen and KVM, if you look at them funny they'll run like crap.
Very interested to see numbers with ESXi and/or Hyper-V!
Yep, in my testing you have to have at least 30% read as part of your workload for it to have a tangible difference. As I have said many a time: storage isn't one-size fits all. Everyone's a little different and there's more than enough money in the space for everyone.
...even if I don't quite understand why anyone (excepting very select niches) would choose some of 'em
Not all CSAs are complex. Proximal is "fire and forget". vFlash will be there in August, I'm sure. There are others that are as simple, or close to. It's only when you start layering on the features that the CSAs get into "job security" territory...and I start wondering "why don't just go full-hog, use a server SAN and be done with it?"
"They have to be 100% reflective at all encountered laser frequencies, but they're not, so they would heat up, degrade and vapourise."
Aye, but properly designed they not only reflect some of the oncoming fire but function as ablative armour. Plasma sheilds could be useful for a starship looking to project a field that works somewhat like a proper navigational deflector. If we could find a way to regenerate ablative reflection armour we'd have a half-decent combat hull to boot.
Perhaps a substance that could be secreted onto the hull that would instantly harden/freeze such that it had the relevant reflective and ablative properties? The issue with both ideas (plasma shields and regenerative ablative armour) is that is having to carry the stuff around everywhere. If you get too far from port and get into the shit you have to limp back home to refill your defensive capabilities.
Now, if you could collect the relevant elements using a bussard collector (perhaps by parking next to a gas giant, star of other friendly source of volatiles) then you might be able to make all of this lovely stuff in situ. Which brings us back to the same problem as in the paper: power.
The magnetic confinement for plasma shielding and the bussard collectors would require enormous amounts of power. Terawatts upon terawatts. Element separation, refinement and manufacturing of polymers for your armour would also take a stupendous amount of power.
Matter/antimatter is unlikely as a power source: even if we could figure out how to make antimatter without using a significant fraction of the output of a star, you piss away more than half the energy from the reaction as unrecoverable "energy" like neutrinos. That leaves fission and fusion. Fission because Uranium is bloody everywhere and fusion because - while fission is cute and all - fission just can't deliver the power needed.
So, in order to play the space combat game with even the remotest chance of survivability, each starship will require at least two power plants: a fission "spark plug" and a set of truly enormous fusion reactors to output the kind of energy needed. Napkin maths say that you're probably looking at a ship so large that Kirk's Enterprise* would be considered a shuttlecraft beside it.
Which means, quite simply, "not in our lifetimes."
*Not the Jar Jar Trek version
"Gates philanthropy does not excuse the decades of lying, cheating, stealing, and ruining of other people's lives and businesses that Gates (and Ballmer and others) performed in order to acquire all that money."
Maybe, maybe not. But people change. Ever think that maybe Billy G did? He was evil. There is a distinct possibility that he currently is not.
@Ledswinger if you are advocating that laws be drafted and enforced* under which you could seek financial recompense for time spent reading an article that under no sane interpretation were you forced to read then please, for the good of our entire species die quickly and without issue. I fear such arrogantly entitled idiocy may not only contaminate the gene pool directly through propagation of your lineage, but by proximity, in a manner similar to DNA-destroying high-energy photons.
Espousing a belief in remuneration for time wasted voluntarily - even if done only semi seriously - is, in my opinion, "high energy stupidity" of such overwhelming composition that it should be added to the Geneva convention with all possible haste.
*Or that extant laws be mangled such that they be turned to such a vile perversion of social justice.
It's all pretty simple, really. Software defined storage players have commoditised everything from teiring to deduplication. Anyone of any size can now make better use of their storage. That reprieve won't last, and soon we'll be back to the disk vendors, hat in hand.
Only this time, we'll be running more workloads against the disks, and deduplication, compression and $deity knows what else as well. So we'll need faster disks. More SSDs. Hybrids and so forth.
I never ends.
If you think for a second that Intel has the patent portfolio to take on the entire IT industry, you're mad. Intel versus ARM is Intel versus everyone. Do you honestly think their last act would be to SCO their own customers?
If they did, they could kiss becoming a high-end fab company goodbye.
"It's easier to not tweet than to tweet. I prefer the simplicity of silence."
Says the fellow who has posted enough on an even more obscure medium - The Register's comments section - to have attained Silver Badge status.
At least on Twitter I can keep up with my friends and other people across the industry. Things like vBeers are organized on Twitter. I get together with and socialise with Tweeple that are part of my local daily life and my professional life.
At the El Reg forums seem to get used for it bitching and elitism.
Now, I'm no better - I use the forums for bitching and elitism too - but at least I'm not out of touch enough to keep trotting our the old trope that Twitter is all about "self interest." Twitter is an instant messenger for conversations that don't need - or may benefit from not being - kept private. It's a shitty, badly designed, limited and terrible replacement for IRC.
What it isn't is a "microblog," no matter how much that may have been the original design, or how much some people want to think that label still applies.
There's plenty wrong with Twitter, but $deity man, please get plugged in enough to bitch about that actual problems with the service. Like that fact that it's predecessor (IRC) was far - far - better for the task than Twitter is today.
I see that rather than participate usefully and transparently in this conversation, offering the benefits of your claimed experience in a trustworthy manner you have chosen instead to resort to assertion and belittling. How very disappointing. You almost had me believing you might be more than a pseudonym with an axe to grind. Sadly, however, the standard of discourse on the internet doesn't appear to have been raised today.
How do I deduce there is emotion? You cannot separate a discussion of one item - in this case my assessment that "in general, VC of tech companies aim for 10X" from a discussion about Pure. They are two separate things entirely.
Personally, I share some of your concerns about Pure. I don't personally believe they're worth 10X. In fact, based on publicly available information, I'd say even their current ~$3B valuation is more than a little hopeful. They're a niche hardware solution in a world going SDS; their current offering isn't revolutionary, it isn't going to change the world, and it isn't enough to see them through to the end of the decade. If this is all they have, they're dead.
Now, that said, I don't believe for a second that Pure has all cards on the table. They have a lot of the top folks from the industry. EMC, Veritas, 3Par/HP and more have all lost minds to this lot. I am not so naive as to think that they don't have R&D ongoing and even - given their size - a skunkworks project internally working to get a "one more thing" ready for prime time.
Is it enough/will it be enough to make $3B when the bubble collapses in 18-24 months? No idea. I don't have enough visibility in there to know what the cards held close really are. I do know that a lot of really bright, really experienced people have gone over to Pure; the sort of people who do structured Due Diligence before accepting positions. That says to me that there is something more than meets the eye there, even if I, personally, do not know what it is.
I am, however, certain that the VCs involved would not be dumping this kind of cash into Pure unless they were convinced it wasn't going straight to hell in short order. Have you looked at who's investing?
As regards my claim that "tech VCs generally seek 10X," I am basing this statement off of guidance given to me by numerous VCs, CxOs and VPs throughout the valley. I have good reason to trust their guidance and advice. I also made a gross generalization about a field in which there is a certain amount of subtlety, something that any reader of this comment thread should have easily been able to pick up on.
You claim to have an "extensive background in venture capital." This then raises the following issue: I have on the one hand a pseudonymous commenter on an internet technology blog making an assertion about generalized guidance that runs counter to the claims made by individuals I know and trust.
I do not dismiss out of hand that you could be correct. Alternately, you could be a pedant, taking offense at a generalization.
Still further you could be someone emotionally invested in the fate of Pure, seeking to grasp at any available straw to discredit everything I said by focusing on a generalization for which any number of exceptions could easily be found. (Given your inability/unwillingness to separate Pure from the 10x statement in order to discuss this more granularly, I lean towards this interpretation.)
Ultimately, I don't have enough information about you to judge. You're a pseudonym: functionally anonymous and with no posting history. I do have information from my sources, and even from just watching the market. I even - shocker of shocker - have information and analyses that I can't reveal because it would compromise my sources . That's part of the job.
So, we're at a crossroads here. One one where you and only you can set the direction. This seems to matter a great deal to you - and it matters not at all to me - so it seems fair that the ball is in your court.
I use my real name, and information about me is easy to find all about the internet. Send me an e-mail. Tell me who you are, what your credentials, work experience and so far are. Whom do you represent? Whom do they represent? What do you feel I am wrong about, and why?
I'll gladly arrange to do a full-blown interview with you, then take that information and sit down with my other contacts and get their point of view on the matter. We'll see what they have to say and present the information in an article.
I don't have a problem being wrong. When that occurs, I want to know how and why, where I made mistakes or was misled. I want to know what I need to know to correct the error and then I usually write a blog about it so that I can share my new understanding with my readers.
So: who are you? An experienced hand attempting to correct the errant ways of a rookie, merely an anonymous voice on the internet, or someone with an axe to grind?
Learning and spreading what I learn is my goal. What's yours?
Have a great day! ---> Beer, because everyone needs to chill once in a while.
I am perfectly aware of the low rate of success - especially "grand slam" success - of venture capitalism. I don't know what gave you a different impression, but it wasn't anything I wrote.
Additionally, I never said VCs get 10x. I said they want 10x. It's the goal they try for, especially in tech. Thus what they push companies to structure themselves for, especially those heading towards an IPO, as opposed to acquisition.
Reading comprehension. Try it some time.
Edit: I find it exceptionally weird that you signed up an account today just to post that one comment based on what appears to be a singular lack of reading comprehension. It makes me wonder all sorts of things about your motivations...but also why the above commentary so deeply upset you.
Isn't it obvious? P2P means you're a dirty pirate and thus you should be drowned in acid while having your eyes consumed by a thousand angry ants. You're a blight upon the earth and your genetic lineage is worthless. Only the unclean of heritage and impure of mental capacity would question the unquestionable and inalienable natural right of corporations to hold copyrights eternally. In the name the actual content creators, of course.
Sending data from one end user to another would never mean that you were attempting to take advantage of the past 40 years of technological development to launch a new business where everyone involved operates from their home. It would never mean that you might want to run a fish cam to show off your 180 gallon fish tank in real time or enable collaborative distance learning for home-schooled s/children/workers/retraining adults.
That's nonsense. You are a consumer. Consume! Pay your subscription for internet, for mobile, for cable, for Azure, for e-mail, for web services, for rent and gas and power and everything else. Your paycheque comes in and it goes out to subscribe and to rent. You are not allowed to own a goddamned thing, you poxy whoreson. That is reserved for your betters, prole. You will pay your life subscription and you'll be grateful for the privilege!
Any attempt to better your social station, to innovate, or to change the power structures that exist in society today makes you not only a bad person, it makes you a criminal. By default. There is no inquisition. There is no trial. You are guilty until proven dead.
Now, where's my fucking money?
"If she wants to sell her body, that's her perfectly legitimate choice."
Aye, but if you're having unprotected sex with strangers then you have sex with me on the basis that we are in an ongoing relationship I do believe there are both moral and ethical requirements to let me know about my potential exposure to incurable sexually transmitted diseases.
I've no issue with the lady sleeping with whomever she enjoys; for fun or profit, her body is hers. It's where the fluid intermingle that lives can be ruined and I believe both parties in any even semi-committed relationship owe each other a duty of care.
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