Beowulf & VMWare

[Marquardt, Paul]

> The organization I work for has been toying with the idea of server 
> consolidation.

To further add to the requirements, I am required to provide NT support for
web applications running on IIS.
> 
> One of the scenarios presented by the group was to build a Beowulf 
> cluster and use VMWare GSX Server to partition it.

Paul, I hope you read the list -- my direct email to you @okdhs.org failed.

Sorry about that, we have noticed that some versions of Send Mail have
issues receiving emails from our organization. It is a problem in the
filtering that is done by Send Mail. If you take our domain out of that
filter, you will have no problems sending or receiving mail to our domain.

> This solution seems to offer endless ideas of distributed processing 
> and the ability to run multiple operating systems on a large clustered 
> platform.

We've done that to a limited extent. The VM license was the main limit, and
we didn't have a customer requirement spend more time on it.

You have done this (run VMWare over Beowulf?) or something different. I
really want to be able to tie several large machines (4-8 processors) with
Beowulf, and then install VMWare to allow me to use the distributed power of
the machines to utilize more of the processing power of the servers. At this
point I have a lot of machines that are underutilized. I would like to
reclaim that processing power, but also allow myself to install more virtual
machines than one server can handle and allow Beowulf to manage the
processes created by VMWare.

A more common thing to do is to run virtual cluster node in a VM-Ware
virtual machine, which works very well.

I have seen a lot of information on this type of implementation, however I
have no need for this type of an implementation. I could see it being very
useful for testing of distributed applications, or possibly in testing
environments.

The more virtual machines I can add to the cluster the better. I have a lot
of hardware available to me, and would like to begin utilizing it to more of
its potential. I would like to have the ability to virtualize more of my
servers that do little or no work, but I need to make sure that they have
good redundancy built into them. (Clustered VM's would be good for that).

Is Mosix more suited for this type of an implementation than Beowulf?