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

[Andrew Cooks]

Hi

There are various options for running a Single System Image cluster
where the OS is aware of multiple nodes. Last time I checked, they had
typical limitations of not being able to run different threads of a
single process across multiple nodes and not being able to migrate
processes doing memory mapped io.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image
http://lwn.net/Articles/384200/

I don't think that a hypervisor that can span multiple nodes of
generic PC hardware and run a regular PC OS is commercially available,
but it would definitely be interesting to see what can be done with
the SGI Altix machines.

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

There's usually a more efficient way to do things. Once you've
analysed the problem that would require such a machine well enough
that you could build the machine, you'll have a more elegant and
robust solution that doesn't require such a machine. There are just
too many layers of abstraction between the application and the bare
metal and to get reasonable performance with the old PC way of
building the application into one massive process.

>From a practical perspective, can you think of any task that would
require such an architecture?

A.

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Marcos Raúl Carot Collins
<marcos.carot at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I been just curious of whether is possible to build a VM on top of a
> cluster, in such a way that the VM has the processing power and memory of
> the cluster as if it was one machine.
>
> Google says things like clustering services, or Beowulf clusters, but could
> not find anything about say a Qemu, Xen or similar based on a cluster of
> hardware.
>
> Any ideas? Have you heard of such setup?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Marcos R Carot Collins
>
> Business:
> -Sound Therapy -http://www.soundtherapyperth.com
>
> Family:
> -Carot Collins
> -http://www.carotcollins.com
>
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