In reply to jaap karman.

Hi Jaap,
thanks for your comment. A full answer may be worth another post on its own, but I can still summarize my thoughts in few lines here.

First, sometimes it may be better to segregate some services 'outside' of the heavy-duty compute machine(s), just because their usage of resources is totally different. Think for example about the SAS Metadata Server, SAS Middle tier components, SAS Grid Control Server services, etc. . In this situation, virtualization may be a good candidate.

Regardless of this consideration, SAS Grid Manager software can be useful even with a single heavy-analytics box, whether that is a big, expensive, old-style unix server or a modern relatively-cheap multicore linux machine. In this scenario, the added value does not come from aggregating resources, but controlling them. Actually, the part of the name of our software that I like the most is "Manager". SAS Grid Manager can give a SAS Admin complete control over the services and jobs running in the environment, without spending hours on the phone with the IT dept to understand what's going on.

But, as I wrote, that's worth another post :-)

Edoardo