Cooperative computing

[Rhidian]

Hi,

Are there any products available that will allow me to perform some type of cooperative computing i.e. use the processing power of multiple ESX servers to run a single VM, I have read a little about vCloud but couldn't tell if this was an available product or a development line?

[weinstein5]

Might be under development but I do not know - Currently a VM can only run on a single ESX/ESXi host at a time -

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

[AntonVZhbankov]

No. There no any products to run general purpose OS like Windows / Red Hat Linux as single VM across several boxes (except Fault Tolerance, but is is just a mirroring).

If you want distributed system you should design at as distributed from the very beginning. Technically problem is with memory access latency. Local memory latency is about nanosecond, while most powerful and high-speed networking (like Infinband) can give you microseconds at most, and most likely tens or hunderds microseconds, so 1000:1 to 100 000:1 longer. And all this time CPU will just wait for data from the memory.

Technically you can build such distributed VM with 32 CPUs, but it will look like 32-CPU machine built with 386 processors.

---

MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Rhidian]

Is the vCloud application going to enable running VM's across multiple boxes for typical operating systems or am I miss understanding somthing?

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

vCloud isn't a product as such. It is an initiative that uses an API to allow a developer, hosting provider etc to offer virtualization services. Some of those services would include things like clustered web servers or services that could migrate from internal to an external service. For the most part this would be services or processes that you would need to create. They would usually be used to expand or collapse computing power based on a fluctuating need rather than raw horsepower.

If you are looking for something like clustered processing have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing) This kind of thing wouldn't be appropriate in a virtual setting.

[AGJS78]

Hi I may search aboust the products, i just also want to know about cloud computing, are there are any insights?