[Xen-devel] xen and virtual iron

["Sean Harper" <harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At Linuxworld a company called Virtual Iron is demoing a product that,
like Xen or VMWare, can break physical machines into virtual machines.

However, unlike Xen or VMWare, this product can also aggregate physical
machines into virtual machines.  In other words, it is possible for the
user to specify that 3.5 cpus from 2 machines (2 from 1 and 1.5 from
another) be assigned to a virtual machine. When linux boots on that
virtual machine it simply looks like a 4 cpu machine (but 1 of the cpus
is slower). Presumably there is a pretty big performance penalty for
sharing across machines, which they mitigate to some extent by requiring
Infiniband.

It seems like most of the tricky work is around caching to optimize the
performance across the slower communication bus (when sharing between
machines).

Is this sort of capability something that anyone involved with Xen is
thinking about? Despite the performance impacts I can imagine this being
a useful tool in big datacenters.



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