Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#2This is one of these things where virtualisation can help even more. For example, VMware can dynamically put servers in standby mode when demand is low and power them up again when needed: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#3This is one of these things where virtualisation can help even more. For example, VMware can dynamically put servers in standby mode when demand is low and power them up again when needed: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right?
Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance.
Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial. In fact, the same ideas are behind Rackspace's "OnMetal" initiative:
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#4This is one of these things where virtualisation can help even more. For example, VMware can dynamically put servers in standby mode when demand is low and power them up again when needed: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right? Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance. Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.…
If you want to power manage your pets, VMware makes sense. But yeah, there's a reason Facebook doesn't use virtualization.
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#5This is one of these things where virtualisation can help even more. For example, VMware can dynamically put servers in standby mode when demand is low and power them up again when needed: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right? Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance. Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.…
Getting IPMI controllers to do what you want is anything but trivial :)
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right? Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance. Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.…
Getting IPMI controllers to do what you want is anything but trivial :)
[deleted]
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right? Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance. Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.…
Getting IPMI controllers to do what you want is anything but trivial :)
Seriously. A person who would advocate using IPMI at scale has either never owned an IPMI card or has never worked at scale or both. The just don't work, and they erase whatever power savings you're trying to achieve.
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#8This is one of these things where virtualisation can help even more. For example, VMware can dynamically put servers in standby mode when demand is low and power them up again when needed: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm
You know that would be trivial to do with bare metal and out of band management cards like Dell Dracs, IBM RSA cards, HP ILOs, or generic IPMI BMCs, right? Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance. Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.…
> Disclaimer: building this type of thing (on bare metal) is a chunk of my day job. I see it as unbelievably trivial.
You do, I'm sure, because you've invested a lot of time learning it and building tooling around it. For anyone who isn't a full-time sysadmin, debugging all of the many and various quirks in management hardware is a major time sink versus scripting a VM server's API.
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting IPMI controllers to do what you want is anything but trivial :)
Seriously. A person who would advocate using IPMI at scale has either never owned an IPMI card or has never worked at scale or both. The just don't work, and they erase whatever power savings you're trying to achieve.
Real servers can't be bought without IPMI and AFAIK the BMC cannot be turned off, so it's probably not worth worrying about BMC power if there's nothing you can do about it.
Re: Making Facebook’s software infrastructure more energy efficient with Autoscale
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously. A person who would advocate using IPMI at scale has either never owned an IPMI card or has never worked at scale or both. The just don't work, and they erase whatever power savings you're trying to achieve.
Real servers can't be bought without IPMI and AFAIK the BMC cannot be turned off, so it's probably not worth worrying about BMC power if there's nothing you can do about it.
Sure, but as you're aware facebook, google, et al don't buy "real servers", they buy servers that actually meet their requirements. That's why "real vendors" like HP have missed the boat on selling millions of servers into the cloud.