world gone mad

At last night's New York MySQL Meetup we had a great presentation on the new stuff in RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 from Goutham Kandiar (from RH's NY office down the block). The highlight was when he moved a running MySQL server from one laptop to another.

Now, I'm a Sales Engineer, so I can appreciate good dog & pony shows. I can really appreciate the difficulty of making a dog or pony of a database. So this was quite a treat.

It turns out all you need is some reasonably modern hardware (they had Lenovo T60s with on-chip virtualization) and xen. You can use older hardware, but you'll have to modify your kernel (which limits you to OSes where that is a possibility). Goutham had a gigabit switch, making the 256M image move over in ~4 seconds, but he told me that an ad-hoc 802.11g network would still do the trick in about half a minute.

Migrating a running application to new hardware is apparently not yet the kind of thing that is safe to do on high-volume production machines. But that did bring up the inevitable "why would you want to do that?" question. RH had some good examples - the most intriguing to me was being able to run "legacy" OSes on modern hardware - we saw the RH lifecycle (very interesting for somebody like me, who has found himself talking about lifecycles quite a bit), and indeed they stop supporting any new hardware about 3 years after the launch of a version. So if you, for example, still run RH 2.1 but want to run it on slick new hardware, you can do this in a fully support[ed/able] way by running it inside RHEL 5. Good stuff.

Other than that, it was good to see the usual wall street area crew, and great to see that logicworks is doing such a great job getting butts in the seats in New York.