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I am looking at clustering about five machines and I wanted to get some opinions about what is the best way to go about it. I'm wanting to run one VM over the five machines, firstly I want to ask,

1: If I cluster the five machines will there hardware be combined? HDD's CPU's Ports etc..

2: Would the hardware be accessible(Usable) within the VM

Ultimately what I am asking is If I cluster five machines and run a VM over them will that make the VM a 'speed demon' combining CPU's and HDD's?

Also what are some of the clustering operating systems out there at the moment? I have looked around but it seems that allot of it is deprecated or just old.

If you need any more information just ask.

NOTE: Im not wanting the cluster to process files parallel, Im wanting the speed of the processors, RAM and HDD's combined into one VM working over top of the cluster

John Gardeniers
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Elgoog
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1 Answers1

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The ones I know pretty well don't do that, system resources are limited to the host machine the VM is actually running on. The reason the VPS providers can give you mondo-fast instances is that their single nodes are that fast or better.

That said, there are other ways to get what you're looking for, but it isn't virtualization the way we've come to know it. You're looking for something called a Single System Image. There are limitations for these beyond what you'd expect from a VPS, but if your application is written right you can get the single super machine you're looking for. The solutions out there aren't nearly as robust as something like ESX provides.

The Wikipeida article I linked to leads to several of them, mostly academic or scientific in focus. Not all are still under development. Due to the challenges of putting something like this together, they're based on very old Linux kernels.

sysadmin1138
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  • Thank you very much for that detailed answer. Some good reading. This may be a rubbish question but would ESX/ESXi do the job? – Elgoog Feb 08 '11 at 03:58
  • @Elgoog ESX/ESXi will allow you to move a single VM from one Node to another. The VM would never have more resources than the actual node does, however. – sysadmin1138 Feb 08 '11 at 03:59