UKUUG Day 2

Ian Pratt , Xen, a full 1.5 hour talk about Xen

Ian mentions lots of uses for Xen : Consolidate, Avoid Downtime ,
Dynamically re-balance workload to guarantee application SLA's and Enforce security policy

Multilevel secure systems , 1 virtual machine for browsing (back at home) , 1 virtual machine for corporate usage which can securely
connect back to the office.

The Xen 3.0 release is between 4 to 6 week away and will support new architectures Xen is moving stuff out of xen and let Linux do that
stuff for them, this way they can start using ACPI and AGP ,initially Xen was developed as a Server back end which means that
back then people didn't need X and ACPI, this will now change.

SMP virtual machines are now possible, (or how to fake a 32 CPU machine on a single CPU machine ..) Support for the new Intel VTx
extensions which will enable them to run proprietary platforms is also on the roadmap.

Marcus Hardt shows us some Use cases for Xen, since he doesn't get the budget to buy enough machines when teaching HPC he uses Xen to build a Grid in a box. He's also providing people with a Login Cluster which gives people an on demand distro based on their username

Marcus then went on to discuss the Benchmarking he with www.Freebench.org tools regarding Xen.
Ruediger Berlich explained what a grid really is (unlike Oracle's wannabe grid stuff) and how the EGEE project tries to solve the problem of different grid projects not being compatible with eachother by creating and operating a production grid and supporting the end -users by building gLite on top of best of breed of other grid projects.

After lunch I squeezed down my laptops resolution to 640x480 and gave a fast forward openMosix presentation, the 10 minutes left sign really came way to fast, which made me skip a couple of slides and probably made the talk even more chaoitic than it already is :( It probably also made the talk look like I didn't say anything more than the stuff already on the slides which was obviously not the goal.

Dropped back into the Linux on Power talk by Nigel, who pointed us to what he thinks is a better way of displaying/reporting system information
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/analyze_aix/

Back to the hotel to get some food and sleep :)