Is it possible to span one huge Virtual Machine across several physical commodity servers?
Here is our use case:
- We need to implement a 32-processor db server with 64 GB of RAM
- We don't have a physical server of such capacity
- We do have a lot of servers with smaller resources.
Is there a technology or (better) a product that lets us utilize these servers to create a VM with required capacity? Say, are we able to combine 8 physical 4-processor machines with 8 GB of RAM each into one 32-processor "logical unit" with 64 GB of RAM and set up an Oracle server that uses all this capacity?
Before posting this question, we read similar questions but didn't find an answer.
- Combine several physical servers into 1 virtual server
- Cloud Computing – Multiple Physical Computers, One Logical Computer
Maybe, someone could give us a hint now?
Best Answer
There is a commercial product from ScaleMP called vSMP. It allows you to aggregate multiple x86 systems into a single virtual instance. I've never personally tried this before though, but I've been through a presentation from them. If I remember correctly, there are specific requirements for this to work, and you'll need to get some additional hardware (Infiniband for fast, low latency interconnects). It might cost a pretty penny too!