In my mind, a hardware profile represents the virtual hardware you can construct given a box of virtual parts.
The Virtual IT guys like to limit the possibilities, to make the virtual cost more calculable, and to limit the amount of work they have to do.
Some virtual IT shops only pre-built 5 configurations, with no options or add-ons available.
Others give you a handful of basic types, which you can customize.
The "architecture" of any HWP offered represents the architecture of the CPU. Each chunk of hardware (real or virtual) produced has a CPU (real or virtual) which supports an architecture.
The software produced (the virtual images, or appliances, or whatnot) expects to be run on a certain architecture of CPU.
So, we need to be able to map an image somehow desires to run, onto a bag of virtual hardware to execute it.
And the Hardware Profile describes that bag.
On IRC we've discussed backwards compatibility (running 32-bit images on 64-bit virtual hardware) but I think that's a distraction. Since the hardware is virtual, and we're not just picking chips out of a physical bone-yard, there is no reason to configure a 64-bit virtual hardware to execute a 32-bit image. Instead, just spin up a 32-bit virtual server to run it.
So, if you have 2 identical servers, with different virtual CPUs, I'd consider them to be 2 hardware profiles.
I don't think architecture needs to be multi-valued.
It will result in a possible doubling of available hardware profiles, but I don't imagine it will. In Amazon's case, they have exactly 1 low-end profile for 32bit, and everything else is 64bit. I don't see too many 32-bit huge machines with 1TB storage and 16 virtual CPUs.
But I could be wrong.
-Bob
On Jan 20, 2010, at 5:16 PM, David Lutterkort wrote:
On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 12:08 +0100, Michal Fojtik wrote:
So my question here is, what exactly means 'architecture' in hardware_profile ?
Forgot to mention: in some clouds (e.g., EC2), some HWP's are only available in some architectures. For example, small instances on EC2 are 32bit, others are 64bit.
David
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