[wplug] Windows clustering using VMWare and openMosix ... (theory)

Patrick Wagstrom pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu
Fri Oct 1 11:24:24 EDT 2004


So I got the bright idea of trying something like this once.  The short
is that VMWare doesn't like OpenMosix.  It's got some hooks into the
kernel to allow it to do some of the stuff and they don't seem to play
well together.  I only spent a few hours on it, and afterwards got too
annoyed with it, so it might be possible, but I'm thinking no.  Another
fact is that some processes in OpenMosix don't migrate well. 
Specifically process that need lots of disk access.  Because VMWare
creates nice huge files on your hard disk, I don't think it's a good
candidate for this sort of thing.

If you use the higher end version of VMWare, they have a version that
supports multiprocessors mapping to one virtual machine (and of course,
vice versa), but that might be the best you can do.

Hope this helps,

--Patrick

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 11:18, Chris Romano wrote:
> Now, I am not familiar with VMWare or openMosix but had an idea and I
> want to hear everyone's idea on this.
> 
> Say you had a 4 node cluster setup using openMosix.  Could you install
> VMWare with W2K as the guest OS and have a windows cluster?  I know
> that with openMosix, it will only migrate processes and can not split
> a process between multiple CPUs.  Would everything running under
> VMWare have it's own process?  Would VMWare hold that process to a
> single CPU and not let it be migrated to a different one?  If it would
> work, it would be a great way to have a nice cluster for people who
> are stuck with a MS product like SQL server.
> 
> Chris
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