Re: [Condor-users] Using Condor as Host for VMWare Virtual Machines

[Aaron Turner <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Chesal wrote:
> > I'm trying to determine if Condor would be a good solution for me.
> > I currently have a bunch of older, slower machines in my lab that
> > I want to somehow cluster together such that I can host multitudes
> > of VMWare virtual machines.  Currently, each individual machine is
> > only fast enough to host at most one or two virtual machines. 
>
> I personally haven't had a chance to play with all of this yet but
> Condor is very quickly becoming a VM-friendly tool. Check out this
> presentation from Condor Week 2007:
>
> http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/PCW2007/presentations/yoon_vmuniverse.ppt
>
> Condor can launch jobs under VMs for you. And as with all Condor
> installs you can tell Condor "only run X number of jobs concurrently on
> this machine". So you get to tell each machine now many concurrent VM
> sessions to allow.

This is something we are actively looking at. In fact we were basically
waiting for this sort of functionality to become available since it 
makes the whole business of provisioning the required, compliant 
environments for high throughput computing tractable. Very much what the 
doctor ordered.

We have looked at using VMWare as the VM engine, since it has the widest 
ability to run almost anything (or what users will want in terms of 
OSes) on the widest variety of underlying machines (or most of what we 
have to run on.). This having been said I am fairly agnostic, provided 
the VM engine offers the required features at a good price, as the 
important thing is to facilitate the users.

We've also been doing some work on efficiently provisioning virtual 
machines (vmware) to clusters, and so on, although we need to revisit 
this work and test against VMWare's own products for provisioning.

Aaron Turner, White Rose Grid / University of York