Re: [Condor-users] Condor clients using virtual linux?

[Bruce Beckles <mbb10@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Greg.Hitchen@xxxxxxxx wrote:

<snip>
> VMWare and VirtualPC are 2 examples of packages, although I'm led to
> believe that VMWare handles linux OS's better. Maybe there are others
> that are more suitable (or cheaper :))?

There are some people at the university of Reading here in the UK who are 
doing this with Cooperative Linux (coLinux) - http://www.colinux.org/ - 
which has the virtue of being free, even if nothing else.  Have a look at:

	http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00imb/research/ah2005.ppt

...to get an idea of what they are doing.  If they don't get in touch with 
you themselves (I think they are subscribed to this mailing list), or post 
something to this mailing list, get in touch with me off-list and I'll put 
you in touch with them.

Depending on what you want to do, you might be able to get away with using 
the VMWare Player which is free - you'd need one copy of VMware (which 
would cost money) to create virtual machines, but then you could "run" 
them for free on multiple machines using the VMware Player.

<snip>
> 2) Can the VM really be hidden from the PC user? My preliminary
> searching suggests no. It will be there on the taskbar.

I'm pretty sure you can do this with coLinux (but I don't (yet) use 
coLinux myself).  In fact, I'd be quite surprised if there wasn't a way to 
make more or less any VM do this (you might have to run it as a different 
user to the loggen in user), but I'm prepared to believe there are some 
VMs which consider it a "feature" that the user is always aware of their 
presence.

If you are using VMware it might depend on the flavour/version of VMware 
that you use - for instance, I could believe that this might be something 
you could only do via VMrun, which would constrain you to using VMware 
Workstation (I think).  Or it might be something you could only do with 
VMware ACE.  Or it might be something you can only enable via some command 
line option or registry key...  I'm not a VMware expert, so these are just 
hypotheses...

> 3) Is there a way for the condor client on the linux VM to know
> that the windows OS is busy (CPU, keyboard, mouse activity)?

I'd expect that there is, but what I'd expect that it either "just works" 
or it requires major hackery, either of the VM, the Linux kernel or 
Condor, or some combination of these.  The people at Reading who use 
coLinux probably know the answer to this for the coLinux VM (at least, for 
whatever version they are using).

> 4) Or to paraphrase Darryl Kerrigan from the movie "The Castle",
> "You're dreamin' son!" (apologies to all the non-aussies on this
> list, which is the majority).

As the use of coLinux at Reading shows, you're _not_ dreaming, although 
what the caveats are and how sensible it is in your environment, I 
couldn't say...

Hope that helps (or at least gives encouragement!),

	-- Bruce

--
Bruce Beckles,
e-Science Specialist,
University of Cambridge Computing Service.