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Hello friends,

I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can I do
that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge page.

The thing is that I think that if you use that patch, you can make a Cluster
with a lot of Virtual Machines. But what I want to do is the opposite, I
want to make a Cluster with real machines, and then I would like to mount
Virtual Machines on that Cluster. I know, I would like to do a lot of things
and they are a bit dificult, so I need your help and support.

Thank you.

Regards,
Miguel.

Hi,

> I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can I do
> that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge page.
>
> The thing is that I think that if you use that patch, you can make a
> Cluster with a lot of Virtual Machines. But what I want to do is the
> opposite, I want to make a Cluster with real machines, and then I would
> like to mount Virtual Machines on that Cluster. I know, I would like to do
> a lot of things and they are a bit dificult, so I need your help and
> support.

Just to make sure I got it right:
You want to create multiple virtual linux instances and have openmosix migrate
those instances arround your cluster?

I don't think that that would be possible with xen. OpenMosix migrates
processes on operating system level, whereas Xen adds another scheduler
beneath the OS. It might be remotely possible with user mode linux, where
linux instances are mapped to Host OS Processes.
But I doubt you'd get any usefull performance with that setup.

Greetings
/Ernst

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> > I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can I
> > do that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge
> > page.

Vincent's been working to make the OpenMosix kernel run in a Xen guest.

> I don't think that that would be possible with xen. OpenMosix migrates
> processes on operating system level, whereas Xen adds another scheduler
> beneath the OS.

As Ernst said, Xen isn't an app, it's a hypervisor: it runs under *all* of the
guest OSes. Because of this, OpenMosix won't be aware of it and can't
parallelise it.

Vincent's patch is to enable you to tie multiple Xen virtual machines
(possibly on separate host) together to make one large OpenMosix virtual
machine.

With vanilla Xen, you can already migrate running domains around a cluster to
load balance. There's not really a convenient "split" to parallelise a whole
guest OS transparently across multiple hosts.

HTH,
Mark

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On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 06:20:52PM +0200, Miguel Gómez wrote:
> I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can I do
> that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge page.

not really. the patch is here to have an openmosix kernel running under
Xen as Mark said.

> The thing is that I think that if you use that patch, you can make a Cluster
> with a lot of Virtual Machines. But what I want to do is the opposite, I
> want to make a Cluster with real machines, and then I would like to mount
> Virtual Machines on that Cluster. I know, I would like to do a lot of things
> and they are a bit dificult, so I need your help and support.

openMosix is not what you are looking for, because openMosix migrates
object at the process level, whereas VM are a whole operating system.

At a basic start, you can write a small application that will
communicate with other node for gathering lots of heuristic (cpu load,
mem load, ...) and execute xm migrate locally.

that might look like an openmosix userspace scheduler actually.

--
Vincent Hanquez

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Thank you, everybody. You agree about that what I'm thinking is not a good
idea, or at least, it is very difficult. I am sure that it's dificult and I
don't know if I will get something that worths it.
I have been reading the Xen Roadmap and it says that in Xen 3.0 release, one
new feature will be:


- *Cluster management.* We wish to add tool support to provide a
better unified interface to managing a cluster of Xen machines. This would
include features such as automatic use of VM live-migration to load-balance
across a cluster, and the ability to 'evacuate' VMs from a node before
shutting it down for maintenance etc.

And this is what I am looking for!!!, I thought that I could do this on
OpenMosix, but you say that I have to look for another Cluster Technology,
which one? Have you ever done something like this?


On 7/2/05, Vincent Hanquez <tab@snarc.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 06:20:52PM +0200, Miguel Gómez wrote:
> > I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can I
> do
> > that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge page.
>
> not really. the patch is here to have an openmosix kernel running under
> Xen as Mark said.
>
> > The thing is that I think that if you use that patch, you can make a
> Cluster
> > with a lot of Virtual Machines. But what I want to do is the opposite, I
> > want to make a Cluster with real machines, and then I would like to
> mount
> > Virtual Machines on that Cluster. I know, I would like to do a lot of
> things
> > and they are a bit dificult, so I need your help and support.
>
> openMosix is not what you are looking for, because openMosix migrates
> object at the process level, whereas VM are a whole operating system.
>
> At a basic start, you can write a small application that will
> communicate with other node for gathering lots of heuristic (cpu load,
> mem load, ...) and execute xm migrate locally.
>
> that might look like an openmosix userspace scheduler actually.
>
> --
> Vincent Hanquez
>

> Thank you, everybody. You agree about that what I'm thinking is not a good
> idea, or at least, it is very difficult. I am sure that it's dificult and I
> don't know if I will get something that worths it.

Running Xen on OpenMosix can't really be done because Xen isn't an
application. You can, however:
* migrate Xen virtual machines
* run OpenMosix within Xen virtual machines

The combination of these should be able to do whatever you want.

> I have been reading the Xen Roadmap and it says that in Xen 3.0 release,
> one new feature will be:
>
>
> - *Cluster management.* We wish to add tool support to provide a
> better unified interface to managing a cluster of Xen machines. This
> would include features such as automatic use of VM live-migration to
> load-balance across a cluster, and the ability to 'evacuate' VMs from a
> node before shutting it down for maintenance etc.
>
> And this is what I am looking for!!!, I thought that I could do this on
> OpenMosix, but you say that I have to look for another Cluster Technology,
> which one? Have you ever done something like this?

You can do this now, manually: Xen can migrate virtual machines around the
cluster with almost no downtime (a few hundred milliseconds). This works
right now - you can download the 2.0 tree and try it out (there are various
howtos in the mailing list archives).

The roadmap feature is to produce tools that'll manage this automatically for
you using Xen's existing live migration tools.

Cheers,
Mark

> On 7/2/05, Vincent Hanquez <tab@snarc.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 06:20:52PM +0200, Miguel Gómez wrote:
> > > I would like to mount Xen Virtual Machines on a OpenMosix Cluster. Can
> > > I
> >
> > do
> >
> > > that? I have seen a Vincent Hanquez patch in OpenMosix sourceforge
> > > page.
> >
> > not really. the patch is here to have an openmosix kernel running under
> > Xen as Mark said.
> >
> > > The thing is that I think that if you use that patch, you can make a
> >
> > Cluster
> >
> > > with a lot of Virtual Machines. But what I want to do is the opposite,
> > > I want to make a Cluster with real machines, and then I would like to
> >
> > mount
> >
> > > Virtual Machines on that Cluster. I know, I would like to do a lot of
> >
> > things
> >
> > > and they are a bit dificult, so I need your help and support.
> >
> > openMosix is not what you are looking for, because openMosix migrates
> > object at the process level, whereas VM are a whole operating system.
> >
> > At a basic start, you can write a small application that will
> > communicate with other node for gathering lots of heuristic (cpu load,
> > mem load, ...) and execute xm migrate locally.
> >
> > that might look like an openmosix userspace scheduler actually.
> >
> > --
> > Vincent Hanquez

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