Re: [Condor-users] Unix jobs on Windows PCs

[Ben Rogers <ben-rogers@xxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [Condor-users] Unix jobs on Windows PCs

Hi Mike,

I have done some testing using Virtual Machines as condor compute nodes. The testing that I have done that is most similar to what you are looking for is running a Linux instance from a Windows XP box using VMWare Server. This set up worked reasonably well, but it did leave the Windows machine fairly unresponsive (only a single P4 3.4GHz with 3GB of ram, it might be better if you have dual core/cpu systems).

This was problematic since the condor client was running in the Linux VM and you couldn’t detect any properties of usage on the Windows XP system, which means you can’t suspend or vacate jobs on keyboard activity or load characteristics. Because of this I discontinued the couple of test systems that I had up and running. There may be some way to capture activity information, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. From what I’ve seen so far the best way to leverage XP boxes is to make them available for condor only during off hours (if you are looking to run *nix jobs) and either use virtual machines or dual boot. You then schedule the machines to reboot after hours and then prior to reopening in the morning.

The virtual machine route was appealing to us because we weren’t really adding another platform to support. We briefly considered Cygwin but decided that it would be too much like having to support yet another *nix variant in our environment. Hope that helps,

Ben Rogers
Systems Administrator
Dept. of Psychiatry
University of Iowa


On 2/28/07 5:22 PM, "Michael P Smith" <msmith@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,
First, my apologies if this is too broad for this list.  
 
We’re looking into setting up a Condor flock using the machines in our public labs.  These machines run Windows.  We’d like to run Unix jobs on these boxes.  We’re looking into things like running virtual Linux machines on these Windows boxes and other options.
 
Is anyone out there doing something like this?  If so, could you tell us what kind of configuration you have?  Are you doing virtual machines, Cygwin, or other options?
 
Thanks in advance.
Mike
 
 
Michael Smith
Manager, Application Development
User Support and Student IT Enablement
LSU Information Technology Services
 
 

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