> Virtual Machines. Intel and AMD aren’t “compatible”, you can’t cluster non heterogeneous servers together for thin provisioning since you can’t live migrate between them.
> You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor.
The premise is that you're migrating from one vendor to the other, so once you move something to the other pool it shouldn't have to move back. Having to reboot each guest once is inconvenient, but aren't you already doing this every month or two for security updates?
> Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution.
This absolutely is AMD's fault, but the real issue is that their remote management solution (like Intel's) is a closed source black box. If they would open it up then it might be adopted by ARM vendors and so on and no one would have to worry about being abandoned because the community could continue to support it for as long as enough people want to keep using it. And it would put pressure on Intel to do the same thing, at which point they could be consolidated.
> Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs?
That would be the case if we were talking about some low volume product at risk of becoming unavailable. You can still source Opteron systems even today if you really want them. But nobody has wanted them for five years because the migration cost isn't that high.
> You essentially need to convert them and depending on what the OS it might be much more than a simple conversion especially on Linux where you might use specific kernels for each CPU vendor.
The premise is that you're migrating from one vendor to the other, so once you move something to the other pool it shouldn't have to move back. Having to reboot each guest once is inconvenient, but aren't you already doing this every month or two for security updates?
> Then we have monitoring and remote management both Intel and AMD provide completely different remote management solution.
This absolutely is AMD's fault, but the real issue is that their remote management solution (like Intel's) is a closed source black box. If they would open it up then it might be adopted by ARM vendors and so on and no one would have to worry about being abandoned because the community could continue to support it for as long as enough people want to keep using it. And it would put pressure on Intel to do the same thing, at which point they could be consolidated.
> Say you are an architect you now need to buy 100 servers with an expected yearly growth of 10% can you see the risk of dealing with a vendor who previously just threw in the towel and stopped making CPUs?
That would be the case if we were talking about some low volume product at risk of becoming unavailable. You can still source Opteron systems even today if you really want them. But nobody has wanted them for five years because the migration cost isn't that high.