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I was wondering whether the following stack would work, and if so then how well, and what sort of problems I might expect to encounter when setting it up?

  • Hardware layer - lots of cheap servers
  • SMP layer - ScaleMP
  • OS - Linux 64-bit (e.g. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, or any supported by ScaleMP)
  • VM host - VirtualBox or similar running on Linux
  • VM OS - Windows Server (insert relevant edition here)
  • Resource-hungry applications running on Windows Server

What I hope would happen here is that I'd be able to create a number of windows VMs that would each be able to utilise CPUs and memory from across the whole pool of server hardware. This is of interest to me, as the applications in question are Windows-only.

As far as I can tell, each layer is compatible with the next, but I've never tried to set this up before and I don't have suitable hardware to test it on right now. I expect a fair bit of overhead to run a cluster like this, but I'm not sure how much. Any advice appreciated.

user3490
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it is possible to do what you wrote above (tested, working), with the following caveats:

  1. vSMP Foundation from ScaleMP supports the following Linux-based hypervisors: KVM and Xen. So, in your example, change VirtualBox to KVM or Xen.

  2. Benchmarks have shown that while memory aggregation works great (i.e. if your resource-intensive windows application requires large RAM, you will see great performance buy using the RAM across multiple physical nodes this way), but the situation with high-core-cont windows apps isn't as clear (i.e. using computing cores from multiple physical servers might not yield the expected computing scalability of the windows guest OS or apps)

The CPU scaling issue can be overcome by using larger building-blocks (e.g. have the physical servers be 64-core AMD machines, or 32-48 core Intel machines, which is anyway close to the effective scaling limit of windows and windows-based apps)

As for hardware cluster needed to run this, you will need:

bzg
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