Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Hiatus
Apologies for the hiatus. My cat died. I was traveling. I have been working on a real cluster for work. Progress to resume, soon.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
VirtualBox Sun Cluster - Update 1
I haven't actually set up a working Sun Cluster yet using VirtualBox, but I have the component parts set up and working correctly.
Basically, a cluster needs at least two nodes that are individually able to run the application or service that is being clustered. These two systems must share at least two private network connections, be connected to the same public network, and (usually) have access to the same storage.
My goal is to set up a basic, fail-over cluster on my laptop, using two virtual machines as my nodes, so that I can practice basic cluster administration. I'm using Ubuntu Linux as my underlying, host operating system, VirtualBox (Sun xVM) for the virualization software, Solaris 10 for each of the virtual machine "guests", and iSCSI (served up by the host OS) for the shared storage.
First, let's look at my laptop:
Dell Inspiron 1525
Pentium Dual Core (not sure how fast ... maybe 1.5 GHz?)
2 GB RAM
160 GB Harddrive
This laptop is probably barely powerful enough to pull this off. I wouldn't want to try this with anything less that 2 GB of RAM. (I've tried it on a 1 GB laptop, and my single guest OS kept freezing.)
The underlying host OS will be Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Linux. I have the harddrive split up into multiple partitions, and it's set up to boot both Vista and Ubuntu via grub. I would have liked to set up a Solaris partition, since most of my expertise are in Solaris, but Vista and Solaris 10 did not play well together. I can't use Vista as a host OS, (a) because I know virtually nothing about it, (b) because I don't want to risk screwing up my ability to play WoW, and (c) because I'm not aware of free iSCSI target software for Windows, whereas iSCSI Enterprise Target is available for Linux.
More to come ....
Basically, a cluster needs at least two nodes that are individually able to run the application or service that is being clustered. These two systems must share at least two private network connections, be connected to the same public network, and (usually) have access to the same storage.
My goal is to set up a basic, fail-over cluster on my laptop, using two virtual machines as my nodes, so that I can practice basic cluster administration. I'm using Ubuntu Linux as my underlying, host operating system, VirtualBox (Sun xVM) for the virualization software, Solaris 10 for each of the virtual machine "guests", and iSCSI (served up by the host OS) for the shared storage.
First, let's look at my laptop:
Dell Inspiron 1525
Pentium Dual Core (not sure how fast ... maybe 1.5 GHz?)
2 GB RAM
160 GB Harddrive
This laptop is probably barely powerful enough to pull this off. I wouldn't want to try this with anything less that 2 GB of RAM. (I've tried it on a 1 GB laptop, and my single guest OS kept freezing.)
The underlying host OS will be Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Linux. I have the harddrive split up into multiple partitions, and it's set up to boot both Vista and Ubuntu via grub. I would have liked to set up a Solaris partition, since most of my expertise are in Solaris, but Vista and Solaris 10 did not play well together. I can't use Vista as a host OS, (a) because I know virtually nothing about it, (b) because I don't want to risk screwing up my ability to play WoW, and (c) because I'm not aware of free iSCSI target software for Windows, whereas iSCSI Enterprise Target is available for Linux.
More to come ....
Thursday, September 25, 2008
VirtualBox Veritas Cluster
I've put the Sun Cluster project on hold for a bit in order to investigate the possibility of building a Veritas Cluster. I was able to get ahold of some trial license keys for VCS on Solaris, but the installer won't enable the software on my virtual nodes with them. My suspicion is that Solaris 10 x86 32-bit isn't supported by VCS, and isn't recognized by the installer / licensing software.
The keys work on a SPARC box, but I don't have a 64-bit x86 box to test this on, unfortunately, so I'll have to wait for a friend to help with this one.
The keys work on a SPARC box, but I don't have a 64-bit x86 box to test this on, unfortunately, so I'll have to wait for a friend to help with this one.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
VirtualBox Sun Cluster
My current project is to build a working Sun Cluster on my laptop using VirtualBox.
Basic setup:
Hardware:
Basic setup:
Hardware:
- Dell Inspiron 1525 w/ 2GB of RAM
- Ubuntu 8.04
- JWM GUI (instead of Gnome, to conserve memory)
- VirtualBox 2.02
- Enterprise iSCSI target
- Solaris 10 5/08 x86
- Sun Cluster 3.2 (w/ secret, unsupported 32-bit binaries)
I have found the blog and forum postings of other people very helpful:
Configuring the network:
Setting up iSCSI and Sun Cluster in VirtualBox:
- http://system-log.tyr.org.uk/2008/06/27/building-a-solaris-cluster-express-cluster-in-a-virtualbox-on-opensolaris/
- http://blogs.sun.com/mramcha/entry/solaris_cluster_on_a_laptop
Stay tuned for further details.
Inaugural Post
Did I spell "Inaugural" right? No idea.
The purpose of this blog is to provide me with a place to record the progress and outcome of the little technical projects I do in my spare time, in case anyone else is interested. When I can't figure out a particular technical problem, a Google search usually reveals that someone has already solved it. I'd like to return the favor.
The purpose of this blog is to provide me with a place to record the progress and outcome of the little technical projects I do in my spare time, in case anyone else is interested. When I can't figure out a particular technical problem, a Google search usually reveals that someone has already solved it. I'd like to return the favor.
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