russell aspinwall wrote: > Hi, > > If I wanted to run Virtual Machines on x64 hardware in a HA environment. > Which would be the best approach? > > Would this work? > "Run OpenSolaris/Solaris on multiple x86 servers and use Sun Cluster to > create a cluster, with VirtualBox running multiple VBox (hosting the Virtual > Machines) which run on the cluster." >
Hi Russell, Just to make sure I'm clear about your goals: It sounds like you want to run the cluster software itself on two or more different physical machines. Then you want to run some sort of guest virtual machines, in which you will run applications. If you want to use VirtualBox, the easiest approach would be to treat the vbox guests as "black-boxes" from the cluster perspective, such that the vbox guests would be the unit of failover. That is, the cluster would start up a guest on one node, and if that node fails, or the cluster otherwise detects problems, it would start up the guest on a second node. You can run one or more applications inside the guests, but the cluster wouldn't know about those individual applications. Unfortunately, no one has yet written an "agent" (the glue software that is required for any application to run with clustering) for VirtualBox guests. If you're interested in writing an agent, there's a wealth of information about doing so. You can start exploring here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/ohac/Documentation/Agents/writingagents/ If you do pursue a vbox agent, please consider sharing your work with the rest of us! If you're open to other virtualization solutions, there are a couple alternatives to virtualbox on x64. There's an agent for zones on both S10 and OpenSolaris that allows you to failover zones as black-boxes. Also, on S10, you can create virtual clusters of zones. Additionally, on OpenSolaris, you can use xVM (based on Xen). There's been some work to create an agent for xVM and Open HA Cluster. See http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ha-xvm/ Thanks, Nick
