On Apr 22, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Geoff Nordli <geo...@grokworx.com> wrote:
From: Ross Walker [mailto:rswwal...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:34 AM
On Apr 20, 2010, at 4:44 PM, Geoff Nordli <geo...@grokworx.com>
wrote:
If you combine the hypervisor and storage server and have students
connect to the VMs via RDP or VNC or XDM then you will have the
performance of local storage and even script VirtualBox to take a
snapshot right after a save state.
A lot less difficult to configure on the client side, and allows you
to deploy thin clients instead of full desktops where you can get
away
with it.
It also allows you to abstract the hypervisor from the client.
Need a bigger storage server with lots of memory, CPU and storage
though.
Later, if need be, you can break out the disks to a storage appliance
with an 8GB FC or 10Gbe iSCSI interconnect.
Right, I am in the process now of trying to figure out what the load
looks
like with a central storage box and how ZFS needs to be configured to
support that load. So far what I am seeing is very exciting :)
We are currently porting over our existing Learning Lab Infrastructure
platform from MS Virtual Server to VBox + ZFS. When students
connect into
their lab environment it dynamically creates their VMs and load
balances
them across physical servers.
You can also check out OpenSolaris' Xen implementation, which if you
use Linux VMs will allow PV VMs as well as hardware assisted full
virtualized Windows VMs. There are public domain Windows Xen drivers
out there.
The advantage of using Xen is it's VM live migration and XMLRPC
management API. As it runs as a bare metal hypervisor it also allows
fine granularity of CPU schedules, between guests and the host VM, but
unfortunately it's remote display technology leaves something to be
desired. For Windows VMs I use the built-in remote desktop, and for
Linux VMs I use XDM and use something like 'thinstation' on the client
side.
-Ross
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