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
roarvio
roarvio(7) System Manager's Manual: RoarAuido roarvio(7)
NAME
libroar - RoarAudio sound library
roarvio - RoarAudio virtual IO layer
SYNOPSIS
#include <roaraudio.h>
struct roar_vio_calls;
DESCRIPTION
The RoarAudio VIO interface is RoarAudio's IO abstraction layer. It provides basic IO functions such as read and write independing on the
underlaying IO. For Example can you open a plain or a gziped file via the VIO layer. After a successful open both objects behave the same,
libroar takes care about the compression in the gzip case.
TUTORIALS
Tutorials can be found in roartutvio(7).
IMPORTANT FUNCTIONS
There are several important functions. This is a small list of the most important ones.
Opening
roar_vio_open_file(3), roar_vio_open_fh(3), roar_vio_open_stdio(3), roar_vio_open_dstr(3), roar_vio_open_proto(3).
While there are a lot functions important for opening files the most important one is roar_vio_open_dstr(3). It opens a stream based
on URLs that can point to local files or files on remote machines. It also can handle compression and encryption.
Closing
roar_vio_close(3), roar_vio_shutdown(3)
Reading and writing
roar_vio_read(3), roar_vio_write(3)
Seeking and positioning
roar_vio_lseek(3)
Non-Blocking and Asyncron IO
roar_vio_nonblock(3), roar_vio_sync(3), roar_vio_select(3)
Networking and Sockets
roar_vio_accept(3)
String handling
roar_vio_printf(3)
BUGS
A lot...
SEE ALSO
roar-config(1), roartypes(1), roartutvio(7), RoarAudio(7).
RoarAudio May 2011 roarvio(7)