October 29, 2004
Cheaper servers?
I wonder if it would be possible to create distributed virtual machines. Meaning launch virtual machines on regular work stations that people are sitting in front of and basically syphone off the idle cpu cycles to perform the tasks normally reserved for a server, such as dhcp, mail, or dns. In a small company where those services are not heavily loaded it seems like it could be a feasable solution.
Posted by nekstrom at 02:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Distributed Computing and Virtualization
It seems that virtualization has much in common with distributed computing. One of the biggest problems it faces is scheduling. How to decide what to run where and when to do it.
Another problem they both seem to face is fault tolerance. How do you recover from a problem. In my experience with Dogma if a node had a problem then we just gave the job to another node and didn't do any type of recovery of already done work. The same scheme seems to be used with virtualization except the costs are much higher. Meaning it costs a lot more to shutdown the problem vm, bring up a new one and launch it than it does to just send the work to another node.
Posted by nekstrom at 02:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack