01-13-2009
Most of the times the IT experts have no say at all in the layout of the environment. Decisions are usually made by beaming sales people showing colourful brochures to ignorant managers while telling them everything is possible. (Which might be even correct for sufficient values of "everything".) I have seen horribly undersized machines choking on applications they were in no way fit to run and i have seen really big irons run applications for which a pocket calculator would have had enough computing power. Usually this is blamed on the IT for good measure and after firing half of the SA staff the manager having decided the issue is promoted for "being cost-effective".
Enough of the lament and back to topic: First off, there is no general rule without exception: every system has to be evaluated in its own right and sometimes this may lead to a wide variation of possible conclusions. So take any advice here cum grano salis. It is offered as a rule of thumb and even if most times fitting your system might as well be different.
Having said this: i would usually not use dynamic LPARs or virtual I/O in a production environment, because it adds a layer of complexity to the system. Reducing in layers of complexity usually enhance stability. Having a VIO-server and a system depending on it means there are also two machines instead of one which could fail to interrupt service. It also means there are two machines which might have to undergo service which also means interruption of the service.
Furthermore, a VIO-server clusters risks: if it serves several machines and it fails then all these machines are affected. If you use dedicated disks and one fails only one system will be affected.
For testing/Q&A/etc. VIO-servers and DLPARs are great: they can easily be recreated (which is a great asset in testing), they can easily be moved around, etc., which adds flexibility to the distribution of computing resources. You can easily shift memory, CPU cycles, etc. around to meet the requirements.
For development i think it is usually better to have a stable environment, quite like production. If you can get the developers to do the testing stuff on the before-mentioned test environments (in this case you should guarantee real quick response times for setting up their specified testing environments, ideally some Click-to-create-test-machine mechanism) you can hold the development environment very stable and can afford to be very conservative about it.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN
systemd-detect-virt
SYSTEMD-DETECT-VIRT(1) systemd-detect-virt SYSTEMD-DETECT-VIRT(1)
NAME
systemd-detect-virt - Detect execution in a virtualized environment
SYNOPSIS
systemd-detect-virt [OPTIONS...]
DESCRIPTION
systemd-detect-virt detects execution in a virtualized environment. It identifies the virtualization technology and can distinguish full
machine virtualization from container virtualization. systemd-detect-virt exits with a return value of 0 (success) if a virtualization
technology is detected, and non-zero (error) otherwise. By default, any type of virtualization is detected, and the options --container and
--vm can be used to limit what types of virtualization are detected.
When executed without --quiet will print a short identifier for the detected virtualization technology. The following technologies are
currently identified:
Table 1. Known virtualization technologies (both VM, i.e. full hardware virtualization, and container, i.e. shared kernel virtualization)
+----------+----------------+--------------------------------------+
|Type | ID | Product |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------------------+
|VM | qemu | QEMU software virtualization, |
| | | without KVM |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | kvm | Linux KVM kernel virtual machine, |
| | | with whatever software, except |
| | | Oracle Virtualbox |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | zvm | s390 z/VM |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | vmware | VMware Workstation or Server, and |
| | | related products |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | microsoft | Hyper-V, also known as Viridian or |
| | | Windows Server Virtualization |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | oracle | Oracle VM VirtualBox (historically |
| | | marketed by innotek and Sun |
| | | Microsystems), |
| | | for legacy and KVM |
| | | hypervisor |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | xen | Xen hypervisor (only domU, not dom0) |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | bochs | Bochs Emulator |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | uml | User-mode Linux |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | parallels | Parallels Desktop, Parallels Server |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | bhyve | bhyve, FreeBSD hypervisor |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------------------+
|Container | openvz | OpenVZ/Virtuozzo |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | lxc | Linux container implementation by |
| | | LXC |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | lxc-libvirt | Linux container implementation by |
| | | libvirt |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | systemd-nspawn | systemd's minimal container |
| | | implementation, see systemd- |
| | | nspawn(1) |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | docker | Docker container manager |
| +----------------+--------------------------------------+
| | rkt | rkt app container runtime |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------------------+
If multiple virtualization solutions are used, only the "innermost" is detected and identified. That means if both machine and container
virtualization are used in conjunction, only the latter will be identified (unless --vm is passed).
OPTIONS
The following options are understood:
-c, --container
Only detects container virtualization (i.e. shared kernel virtualization).
-v, --vm
Only detects hardware virtualization).
-r, --chroot
Detect whether invoked in a chroot(2) environment. In this mode, no output is written, but the return value indicates whether the
process was invoked in a chroot() environment or not.
--private-users
Detect whether invoked in a user namespace. In this mode, no output is written, but the return value indicates whether the process was
invoked inside of a user namespace or not. See user_namespaces(7) for more information.
-q, --quiet
Suppress output of the virtualization technology identifier.
-h, --help
Print a short help text and exit.
--version
Print a short version string and exit.
EXIT STATUS
If a virtualization technology is detected, 0 is returned, a non-zero code otherwise.
SEE ALSO
systemd(1), systemd-nspawn(1), chroot(2), namespaces(7)
systemd 237 SYSTEMD-DETECT-VIRT(1)