Virtual Machines
From BeSTGRID
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[edit] Virtual Machine Overview
Each of the grid head nodes hosts a variety of virtual machines that encapsulate different functionality of the cluster.
We are following the guidelines of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), who have several years experience with virtualisation for grids.
[edit] Virtualisation Technologies
Something about KVM,Xen kernels, and VMWAre goes here. We are using Xen kernels, which use a Hypervisor approach...
[edit] Virtual Machines Being Used by BeSTGRID Head Nodes
[edit] NGCompute
[edit] About NGCompute
The role of National Gateway Compute, or NGCompute, is to house Portable Batch System (PBS) software which receives jobs that users have submitted and allocates them to a cluster.
NGCompute is a virtual machine representing the head node of a computational cluster. Traditionally, this would be a separate physical machine, but with a Xen kernel technology, this machine can be housed on any multi-core processing machine. The NGCompute machine at Massey, for example, is a virtual machine held on the gateway machine.
A variety of PBS software can be used, and made to communicate with the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) implementation of the Globus Toolkit. Torque PBS is natively supported in VDT, but it is also possible to use the Sun Grid Engine or OpenPBS, although these may require significant adjustment to VDT/Globus install scripts.
PBS Server was not designed to be run on a separate machine from the submission gateway machine, so a number of workarounds have been created to duplicate log file; to make the client tools and PBS server think they are on the same machine. These are pbs-logmaker and pbs-telltail, which are available from the APAC repository.
[edit] Set Up Information
First it is necessary to create a new virtual machine on a Xen-kernel machine.
For virtual machine set-up see:
After which PBS can be installed and set-up on the virtual machine.
For detailed guides on NGCompute and PBS set-up:
