On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 14:11 +0200, Mattias Hemmingsson wrote:
Hello
I have one question about cluster and vmware. I have about 10 computers they are all old once from 1g and 256 ram.
And now im thinking of putting them all toghter in one cluster. This cluster should be an high performing so all computers share they performance.
Now on this cluster i whould like to install one vmware server and make that vmware server get the power from all these computers. And install a os in that vmware server.
Is this the way passible to do ?
// matte
Short answer: Not possible. At least not what you are asking for.
Longer answer:
If you used some sort of SSI-style[1] clustering with *very* fast inter-connects (10Gb Ethernet, Infiniband, etc...), with a lot of luck, hard work, and man-hours it may be possible. Although, I'm not sure how thread-friendly VMware Server is, or exactly how it will behave in that kind of environment.
Beowulf style clusters require the program that is to be running on it programmed in a certain way utilizing an MPI[2] library. By far, the most common High Performance Clusters utilize grid-style[3] computing (think SETI, cloud computing, etc...) where things are broken down into tasks and organized to be run in discreet parts.
VMware's ESX clustering capabilities[4] are *very* limited in this regard (and also expensive), which it is really coordinating loads across multiple ESX servers, that are usually pretty powerful in-of-themselves, and not distributing the load of a single guest across multiple physical machines.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this very thing...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_clusters [4] http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/drs.html
--Tim