Wouldn't it be great if....

deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
edited November 2006 in Science & Tech
I've been playing with virtual server recently and suddenly had a thought... wouldn't it be great if you could span virtual server across multiple physical servers, in effect adding a layer of abstraction between hardware and software. Imagine if you could beef up a server just by adding a new box to the 'farm' of physical servers. Or if a physical server dies, the farm just reallocates the virtual servers on the fly with no downtime. Can you do this already with clustering?

Comments

  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    It can be done. Put your virtual server disk files onto another server disks and turn off disk logging in VMX config files. There is a risk of data corruption if more than one machine is trying to use the files at the time. The other route is to turn off disk locking and use Windows native failover clustering. I have 2 x GSX machine hosts using the same virtual disks spread across two machines. It works as a proof of concept but it has SERIOUS performance issues.
  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited November 2006
    That's a cut down version of what I meant, imagine if you could dynamically add or remove physical servers to your cluster and it transparently allocated resources to your virtual servers based on some kind of weighting. I think this is where virtual server technologies are heading in the future, a completely hardware independant 'Virtual Abstraction Layer' (tm).
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    IBM already do it.. say hello to AIX 5 and P-Series :)

    http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/
Sign In or Register to comment.