@Andrew Austin
>The attraction (currently) would also be the ability (depending on your whether your hardware / >hypervisor supports it) to have different operating systems and their applications running on >one hardware platform.
That's fair enough.. but if your application runs on x86 metal it's going to run on top of Linux or Windows. If you actually need two small machines, buy two small machines. Buying one big machine and making it two sounds like a really great idea but from experience it doesn't work out as simple as that. When something fails in your "Box of all trades" you have to take all the VM's down or migrate them somewhere (so actually you needed more than one box.. ironically).
>This would allow businesses to have a strategic hardware platform, but some flexibility on the >operating systems deployed on LPAR's / VM's / Containers etcetera.
Again, the things you can mix will be limited by the hardware you had to start with. If you have x86 hardware you can't magically run all sorts of weird and wonderful OSes unless they have x86 ports that play nicely with whatever hypervisor you have chosen or you have an emulator to run them. Containers are a good idea, you have the ability to create seemingly separate environments (and with Linux Vserver you can run seemingly different OSes in those containers, as long as they're Linux coloured that is) but without the nightmare of trying to get Xen/similar not to throw up every 5 minutes. Still you only really have one machine and you have to down all the virtualised environments to do anything with it.
>You also have the potential of porting applications off older hardware, deploy into a LPAR / VM > / Container etcetera, and you can decommission the old kit.
Only if the old kit was the same arch as the new hardware, or you have an emulator.
>Although, if you were a masochist, you could have a pSeries server, running PowerVM >hypervisor (with HMC for admin), with an LPAR running RH Enterprise LINUX, with that RH >LPAR running VMWare, with a WIndows 2003 / 2008 Server 'guest' operating system installed. >Goodness knows how that would perform :)
Is pSeries hardware Power based by any chance? That would sort of explain why it won't run Windows. Does VMWare even have a PowerPC hypervisor?... VM != portable runtime.