[plug] VM made out of a cluster of real servers?

[Lee Standen]

There's probably plenty of tin out there that will do it, but the IBM X3850 X5 will allow you (via an external QPI connector) to link up to 4 chassis together into a single physical box.  Basically you end up with an (up to) 16 socket Xeon server which you can run a standard OS on.


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces+AEA-plug.org.au +AFs-mailto:plug-bounces+AEA-plug.org.au+AF0- On Behalf Of Richard Meyer
Sent: Sunday, 1 July 2012 9:49 AM
To: plug+AEA-plug.org.au
Subject: Re: +AFs-plug+AF0- VM made out of a cluster of real servers?


I can give you a bit of info on the mainframe, after all I've been working off and on with them since the 70's (Yes, I AM that old).

No operating system (as far as I know, and I'm pretty knowledgeable, having worked with MVS+AF8-OS/390+AF8-z/OS, VM/SP+AF8-VM/HPO+AF8-VM/XA+AF8-VM/ESA+AF8-z/VM and VSE in it's many manifestations - no z/Linux (yet)) will actually run an image across multiple machines. You can Sysplex multiple instances of of z/OS across multiple machines, be they physical separate machines, physical partitions of the same machine or separate virtual machines under VM. They are not the same image and cannot just run a workload spread out like that. The sysplex enables workloads to be moved from one machine  to another in case of work load manager requirements or a machine being shut down, but the whole is still less than the sum of its parts as they say.

And, yes, processors can be taken offline and replaced with no downtime.
As for removing and replacing any particular processor from any VM, I'm not sure - the VM may be bound to a single particular processor ... what happens if that has to be offlined? Hmmm .... I don't know.

On Fri, 2012-06-29 at 15:49 +-0800, Andrew Cooks wrote:

+ADwAPA-snipped+AD4APg-
+AD4- 
+AD4- Consider the IBM mainframe. It was around before the beginning of time
+AD4- (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970).  It can run multiple OSs. It has 
+AD4- multiple independent processor boards that you can replace without 
+AD4- shutting down the whole machine. Can any arbitrary processor be 
+AD4- assigned to, or removed from any VM?

+ADwAPA-snipped+AD4APg-

--
Richard Meyer
+ACI-He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster...when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.+ACI-
(Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878)

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