I think this article was in response to some of the issues that were mentioned as a motivation for Github's move away from Engineyard... Specifically, Github mentioned slow IO issues on virtual machines as a significant issue.
FWIW IO performance on Joyent is abysmal, and they supposedly use Sun's latest virtualization technology.
It sounds like the problem is not with the technology but with how it's managed... It's easy to partition memory and CPU resources, but not as easy to partition IO resources.
I'm still waiting for virtual hosts that are paired with their own dedicated solid state storage rather than sharing one hardware IO system or using slow network storage.
Hi Grand -- this is michael. Yes this was to respond to some of the perceptions out there that virtualization = slow. It's really not (at least now, it isnt' - as long as you know what you're doing, some of the tech docs to get the new hardware virtualization features working seem a bit daunting). And on the other hand, there's no alternative to having enough hardware capacity to meet your requirements. Virtualization can't make i/o capacity appear from thin air.
FWIW IO performance on Joyent is abysmal, and they supposedly use Sun's latest virtualization technology.
It sounds like the problem is not with the technology but with how it's managed... It's easy to partition memory and CPU resources, but not as easy to partition IO resources.
I'm still waiting for virtual hosts that are paired with their own dedicated solid state storage rather than sharing one hardware IO system or using slow network storage.