clustering?

[trevorh13]

I am an educational establishment running 2003 Enterprise Edition Server. I want to utilise VMware to create an elearning environment where remote students can logon to pre-configured systems to practice for MCP exams.

Since I am likely to have several individuals connected at anyone time CPU and memory loads are going to be pretty horrendous. I have approx 20+ PII workstations lying around and came up with the idea of using some of them to create a cluster utilising the 2003 cluster service. In effect run them as one virtual server and combine their memory and processing capabilities.

I have never set up or worked with clusters before and would like to do it just for the experience if nothing else!

I guess my questions are fairly simple -

1) Is it possible to link the systems in this way
2) Would I require additional hardware? My main thought here is would I require some kind of SCSI bus or fibre channel SAN to host common storage or could I do this through some kind of network share on each nodes hard disk?
3) If it is possible to set it up and I did what kind of performance would people expect me to get?
4) Does anyone have an alternative solution to what I am trying to achieve?


Any help or advice or "how tos" people can giveor point me towards would be of immense help and interest.


Many thanks

Trevor

MCSE, CCNA

 

[tubbaguts]

The basic are no more than 8 nodes in a cluster with a shared SCSI bus (or SAN) connected to them all. Ok here is the kicker. I do not believe VMWare GSX or workstaion is cluster aware so there would be no advantage to clustering the systems. Plus, cluster with MS cluster does not give any performance advantage only fault tolerance. You would need something like a Beowolf linux cluster and an application that can do parallel computing. That being said, VMware does have some options with it Virtual center to distubute VMsessions to multiple host. Check their website for more detail.

 

[tubbaguts]

Forgot to mention that my employer is setting up a VMware environment to use as an instructional add as well. We are using a setup where a student will connect to a front end system and attached to one of several backend servers for the vm session.

 

[tran008]

I'm in the process of setting cluster server myself. I'm a bit yellow with the first cluster setup. Could someone point me to article or tuturial link?

thanks

 

[tubbaguts]

Windows server 2003 has most of the info you will need in its help and support on the servers. Start>>Help and Support. Search for cluster and/or clustering. MS Technet also is a ood source. Cluster is not for the faint of heart though. Make sure you are build a cluster for the right reasons. Good Luck.

 

[mrdenny]

There is also a Windows Cluster forum forum737 which has lots of folks with lots of cluster experience.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com