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

[Chris Romano]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2004 11:24:24 -0400, Patrick Wagstrom
<pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> 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.  

Like a database ...

> 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.
> 

By reading the websites on both products, I didn't think that they
would play well together.  I was hoping that I might have missed
something, or that someone had a workaround to get it working.  Would
Win4Lin work better?  I only know that by name and am not sure if it
even fits here.  Are there any products that might work in this
situation?  I don't think wine supports any MS server software.

Thanks,
Chris