Re: [Xen-users] crazy SWAP and RAM idea

[Luke Crawford <lsc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> yeah, but if there was a real business model behind this, there would be
> enough RAM. The challenge is interesting and worth thinking
> about, but should not exist in a real business world... But that isn't to
> say people won't do it. There are idiots and a*holes all over the planet
> that will take your money and give you trash or trash-service for it.
I think a real business model for this is possible in theory, but 
perhaps impractical in practice.  If the provider could charge per 
megabyte-minute, and assuming they had a box many times larger than what 
any one customer needed, and assuming all customers had peaky usage with 
different peaks, then the provider could squeeze slightly more out of it's 
hardware with a system like this.  Of course, at the cost of reliability; 
if too many other customers ran over their normal utilization, a customer 
with normal utilization couldn't burst.  This could work well for shell 
servers for guys like me that occasionally want to compile a kernel but 
usually don't use anything heavier than pine,  or people like one of my 
dedicated server customers that runs a normally almost idle blog, but 
who occasionally get linked by digg.
In fact, that might be more realistic than I thought-  what if instead of 
making the ram allocation automatic, you had a simple web/billing 
interface to the balloon driver?  set it up so a customer can buy more ram 
for a period of several days, up to the amount of ram you have 
uncommitted.  I bet most virtual server providers usually have at least 
half a server free; with live migration and this billing -> balloon 
driver interface, they could be making money off that, and allowing users 
with temporarily high resource needs to get what they want without 
committing to a long-term plan.


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