[Beowulf] Using VMWare and Beowulf to create one very largemachine

[Alpay Kasal]

I found:
http://howtos.linux.com/howtos/openMosix-HOWTO/x1699.shtml

19.7.5. Under what conditions does VMWare work with openMosix:

If you intend to run VMWare under openMosix so that openMosix would
load-balance several instances of that (yes, that works). But, if you want
to run openMosix in several VMWare instances and let these instances load
balance (that fails).

The first case works. The latter case does not work because VMware has a bug
in its Pentium emulation that makes VMware crash (not openMosix, but the
VMware binary) on the first migration.

Alpay Kasal
I'm eager to hear about how this works for you - PLEASE TRY!


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On
Behalf Of John Hearns
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 10:07 AM
To: Jon Spriggs
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Using VMWare and Beowulf to create one very
largemachine

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 11:29 +0100, Jon Spriggs wrote:
> I wonder if anyone can help me, I've been playing with the idea of
> using Beowulf to create the "hardware" that VMWare (or something
> similar) will run on top of to have a very (or slightly - depending on
> the number of machines in play) fast machine with lots of RAM and Hard
> Disk Space, which can expand or contract depending on the number of
> workstations that are running.
A Beowulf cluster won't do that for you.

You could think of using a Mosix cluster with VMware
http://openmosix.org
Realise that Mosix works by migrating processes to other machines in a
cluster. It does not present the illusion of one machine with a large
amount of memory.