Ed,

Please put in a plea for me at Warpstock for people to consider
preloading such systems.  The biggest headache of my life is futzing
with hardware issues and ecs (and we aren't getting along at all well
lately as I have this collection of thinkcentres that have now trashed
six harddrives in the last 18 months).  I really want to be able to
buy that expertise.   And, wow, if it was possible to get a fast rack
mount server box that ran multiple instances of os/2 (and other os's)
without any downside (full internet connectivity for each instance,
ability to selectively kill and reboot any particular instance
remotely, normal access to the boot process so that you can do things
like restore archived desktops, boot to command prompt and swap dlls)
I would see this as the golden path to the future.  Imagine putting
squid on one of the instances.  I could expand much more gracefully
and confidently with this kind of set up than my current collection of
used 2006-era IBM rack mount servers.

I've got a mac with os/2 running under parrallels and used to have win
2000 running on an ecs host using virtual pc.  These are not good
enough.  Too tempremental. It needs to be exactly like running
multiple real systems independently but sharing i/o devices.  If
VMWare is really up to this task, I pray someone with expertise steps
up and starts preconfiguring and supporting these systems for those of
us running internet businesses on os/2.   (Hell, if all that comes of
this is that VMWare is supplying a layer that in effect makes it
possible to certify certain hardware as definitely supporting os/2
(VMWare compliant, therefore os/2 compliant), that alone is a gift at
this point even if you only ran one copy of os/2 on the box.)

Tim

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Ed Durrant<edurrant@durrant.mine.nu> wrote:
  

Tim Stephen wrote:
    

Just waking up to this thread ... Does this product mean that one
could purchase and configure a modern rack-mount server-class box
guaranteed to be able to run a whole bunch of ecs copies
simultaneously? I would be very interested in this, and in a service
perhaps a reseller could provide to sell such a server with the ecs
instances installed and minimally configured. One source of anxiety
in my life is what happens in the future as it becomes increasingly
difficult to locate os/2-compatible hardware. We run 3 os/2 boxes as
internet servers in a server farm and I have purchased a number of
used compatible replacement boxes as a hedge against the time our
systems-in-use begin to fail.. It is hard enough to figure out safe
choices in hardware for single user home systems let alone rack-mount
server-class systems.



      

Yes, that is exactly the idea. Unfortunately, ESX only runs on a limited
number of systems (mainly proper server boxes), so no one on this list
has said they have been able to install this as yet and test that eCS
will run as a client OS.

The other possibility (already exists with ESXi v 3 is to buy a server
with the VMWare code already "embedded" in the system. You could then
buy an "appliance image", load that you would be operational with either
a basic or a fully configured system within a matter of minutes.

Of course the system could run other OSes at the same time.

VMWare ESXi V4 is just the latest of many virtualisation products that
have to a greater and lesser extent supported OS/2 and/or eCS as client
and/or host OS. I plan to cover this in greater detail in a
presentation at this years Warpstock Europe.
    

      

--
Cheers/2

Ed