[Quantian-general] VMware clusters

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Ben,

On 17 July 2006 at 18:47, Ben Goodrich wrote:
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| Hi Dirk and everyone,
| 
| - From the fun facts with VMware department, apparently it is an open
| secret that VMware can imitate an Intel e1000 network card (see
| http://sanbarrow.com/vmx.html or the end of
| http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=26561&tstart=0).
| 
| The implication of this is that if you put this line:
| 
| ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
| 
| into your .vmx file, then VMware will pretend it has this generic Intel
| network card, which is included among the cards that the OpenMosix
| Terminalserver will support, whereas the standard VMware network card is
| an AMD Am79c970A, which I believe is not terminalserver-eligible.
| 
| So, you can create a virtual machine cluster within your own computer,
| which is probably not so useful unless you are just debugging something,
| or you can create a (somewhat performance-hampered) virtual machine
| cluster across computers without rebooting them out of Windows as long
| as all the computers have VMware (especially the free-as-in-beer VMware
| Server, which went 1.0 a few days ago).

Have you found this to be 'stable' ?  When I did some initial explorations
with this on my small home network, I found that the 'link' between the
virtual (inside VMware) and real machines dropped, came back, dropped, ...
Certainly no serious test on my part but as I have not yet had a chance to
revisit this, has anyone else?
 
| All this appears to work with "bridged" networking and not (yet?) with
| NAT. But it is probably smarter to set up one of those virtual network
| things, which I haven't exactly figured out yet.

Thanks for the heads-up on this!

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison