Running one MySQL server on two hardware using VMWare products - Is it possible?

[sheridanhu]

Dear All,

Let me tell you that I'm very glad to have found VMWare and it's community..

I have a question which I'm sure will be common knowledge for the experienced, but for me it's a problem.

When I first looked at VMWare (especially VMWare Infrastructure) I immediately started thinking about a scenario like the following. Could you be so kind and tell me if it's possibe, and if yes, what VMWare products should I use? Maybe a good howto to get it quickly tested to see how it works?

Let's say I own two HP servers, each identical, with 2x Intel Xeon quad-core CPUs, 16Gb RAM, and about 1Tb storage space in RAID 6.

I want to run a MySQL server, but in a way that it's run on both machines. I'm not talking about clustering. I'm talking about combining both machines resources (CPUs, memory, disk, etc), and run a guest OS (Linux) and a MySQL off of that single virtual machine. And, maybe, I could do it in a way that the guest OS "sees" only 1 CPU, while in fact the two machines have 4 quad core CPUs, and the computing would still be distributed evenly to all 4 qc. CPUs and all physical "cores" in reality...

Too far out? Is this even possible?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Morten_Dalgaard]

Hi there.

Sorry, what you are asking is not remotely possible. What you are talking about, is clustering in reality, but without having cluster aware software. Even if it was possible to make this work, it would run awfully, because the bandwidth between the different CPUs and memory is limited to ethernet speeds, and not the multi-gigabyte/sec speeds they normally run at. The only way to do this is to have cluster aware software afaik.

[sheridanhu]

Thanks for answering.

Yes. KInd of what I suspected, I guess.

But even if this grand scale thing is not possible, is it possible to create a VM on a single HW which sees and uses 1 CPU, but that one CPU in reality "represents" the 8 CPU cores of the real physical hardware? Thus effectively consolidating the power of all 2 real CPUs and 8 cores into a single virtual CPU?

Levente

[wila · Accepted solution]

NO you cannot do that either. VMware doesn't virtualize the CPU, it simply exposes the parts of the CPU that you want the guest OS to see. You can decide to show just one core or 2 cores (even more if you like, but the physical limits still apply)

[sheridanhu]

Thank you guys! Now at least I'm not in the dark!

[jhanekom]

If you want to start looking for alternatives, the technology you're talking about is called grid computing. I couldn't find any obvious, popular MySQL grid solutions (maybe it's just me and my Google skills), but it seems they do exist. They're not free, however.

[wila]

Well the google grid itself is probably one of the most tantalizing examples of this. There are alternatives in this area, even free (open source) ones as i read about it not so long ago in some magazine somewhere. Wish i could recall which one that was now.

When i do remember/ find it again, i'll leave a post about some details in this thread.