Hi All,
Who's using VMs for production service nodes?
I know Oxford is & have sent some questions, waiting on
any reply.
I've been looking at VMware Server v2 (free acadmeic license) for a
new lcg-CE VM, since we might want a CREAM-CE VM on same hardware. Also
our SL4 MON will be a VM sharing its host hardware with a WLCG-Nagios node
(don't know much about that yet).
Are others using VMWare Server? or if not, what software?
I'm not that far in experimenting but so far am not impressed with
VMWare Server (the documentation is just byzantine).
VMWare Server v2 is completely restricted to having one snapshot only of a
VM. In experimenting/learning, many snapshots are much more useful.
When I used Parallels on Mac, it could do a whole 'tree' of snapshots.
My Mac-using colleague says VMWare Fusion can do many snapshots, so in
looking into Linux version = VMWare Workstation, it too can do many
snapshots. But VMWare Workstation clearly aimed at "desktop" not server.
Does one build VMs using WMWare Workstation & then have VMWare Server
manage them? VMWare Sserver has concept of scripts on host server to
cleanly shutdown VMs when the host comes down & bring them up again, in
staggered order, if there are several. So that sounds useful.
But experimenting with building VMs on VMWare Server so far, only 1
snapshot is not terribly good.
It's said the number of allocated CPU cannot be changed after building VM,
so to have an N-core lcg-CE VM, VMWare Workstation would have to be run on
the real host hardware to allocate enough cores (assuming we don't have
n-core desktops/laptops... I don't)
On 8-core host hardware, how many cores to the lcg-CE VM? How much RAM?
In experimenting so far, the load on the host is not low while the VM is
doing thing like software update; so the host can't get starved for
resources.
Advice or pointers *most* welcome.
PS Hosts for VMs are running SL5.3 x86_64; 8-core, 16GB RAM.
One is Viglen, one is DNUK.
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