Slashdot Mirror

...to ask a question that I wanted to ask as well. Granted, this topic seems a little strange, considering the Linux cluster is in place, and it seems like the kind of question which encourages a Microsoft vs. Linux world domination showdown for grandmaster of the universe. It also shows a limited business sense on the part of the poster (why change something that works well when you can't afford a replacement?).

Right now a coworker and I are looking at pricing and configuring a fault-tolerant cluster for a client who runs Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000. They're a bit paranoid, so they've decided they want a cluster. We've tried to educate them on exactly what a Microsoft cluster can and can't do, so it's difficult to understand exactly what they want (basically an entire network exactly like Microsoft's own, but for $1000).

Pricing on a two system cluster is around $50,000. Buying two copies of Exchange and Windows Advanced Server will total $20,000. Then there's the hardware costs. For our client, they've specifically requested this, so they're ready to pay.

My question to Whamo is are they really taking the Microsoft rep seriously? If they have to pay software costs for their new cluster that's going to mean two things: either buying less CPUs to add to the cluster, or not doing the project at all, because just the software will put them over budget. With Advanced Server running somewhere around $4000 that's a lot per machine when Linux costs at most $5 to burn a CD after downloading it via the university's T1/T3/etc. Whamo says "it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems" and to me that is your answer. If you can't afford the hardware you can't afford to buy Microsoft's software...

Also, there's MOSIX as well, but I don't have much experience with MOSIX and thus cannot comment on it.

Alan praises Mosix a bit in this interview. A bunch of us from irc.openprojects.net are working on a project to package full install/configuration scripts first for Mandrake users, then for everyone. Come check us out at The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project, as you probably guessed, we're also working on packaging LTSP+Mosix script for LTSP 3.0 with the author of the original ltsp_mosix howto.

There has already been some work into this. LTSP for your diskless boxes. There is also some info on running MOSIX with LTSP, here.

MOSIX and a little bit of 'fork' (man pages. wish you could <a href="man:fork">man fork</a>) and yes it's magic. you could try that with apache too. i think someone has done it. although i'm about to find out about sockets and mosix in the next few days. (i'm in the middle of compiling a mosix-ified kernel myself...)

I wonder how this would work with mosix... it could be a dream system!

You could use mosix to combine the compute resources of several boxes to look like one box. And then, you could use this divy up the space so that people don't step on each other. When anyone (working in thier own space) kicks off a large compile, the load would transparently be distributed among all the boxen.

Of course, I have zippy experience with any of this, but it sounds possible.

check out mosix -- it looks like the simplest way to combine the two transparently. I haven't used it, but it looks easy. This would be helpful for some tasks more than others (ie. povray or orher intesive math, but not quake), and of course, things that are multi-process (the same requirement needed for SMP). There was a ./ article about this a while ago.

One word:
MOSIX

It's a breeze to set up and administer. Cool stuff

doh! I forgot MOSIX! MOSIX is a clustering thing! It looks cool.

Look at MOSIX

The link is not www.mosix.org but www.mosix.com.

Fortunately, we don't have to depend on CORBA for what you're talking about. Why not look into MOSIX to see how this is going to be done? (btw, this funded by VALinux now...)