Beowulf & VMWare

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Marquardt, Paul wrote:

> > 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.

As far as I can tell, there is no entirely satisfactory way to control
NT-based applications.

>> > 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

It's the other direction -- your machines will not accept mail.

The scyld.com machine that hosts the Beowulf mailing list is the same
one that hosts the Linux network drivers mailing lists, and thus does
not use any pre-filtering.  The mailing list messages are moderated by
hand.

> 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.

Yes, used VMWare on compute nodes, with the process monitored and
controlled by the master machine.  The VMWare process is started from
the master and put on a compute/server node, but isn't moved after the
initial placement.

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

I would think that the CPU and communication overhead of Mosix would
limit it to support a tiny number of compute nodes.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993