Re: [Condor-users] condor and co-linux

[Vladimir Konrad <v.konrad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Craig,

Thank you for taking time to introduce me to alternatives.

> We're considering an approach like this for our "Pools of Virtual  
> Boxes" project (http://poolsofvirtualb.sourceforge.net) which was  
> modeled after coLinux but uses VirtualBox as a hypervisor because of  
> many advantages over coLinux (64-bit support, multiple CPU, very  
> active development for VirtualBox). We have bootstrapping routines for  
> building CentOS and Fedora based images, Windows services to monitor  
> Windows usage and configure the virtual machine, and some enhancements  
> to pre-package software for deployment.

I use virtual box under linux host, it is good to hear it
works well under windows.

> You could probably accomplish some of this by first submitting a  
> vanilla Windows job to launch coLinux on demand, and then creating  
> some logic within the coLinux Condor to shut down coLinux after enough  
> idle time (or other conditions). Using Hawkeye comes to mind. I  
> believe some care is needed to make sure coLinux is launched with  
> administrator privileges.

That is over-all idea, I was not sure how much integration I would have
to do (i.e. the submit of a job would in fact be a submit of 2 jobs -
start co-linux "vms" first, then submit linux job).

Also, thanks for the tip on Hawkeye.

> With VirtualBox, we're trying to integrate with the Condor virtual  
> machine universe, which should provide some advantages for controlling  
> the process of starting and stopping on demand. In practice though,  
> having VirtualBox running a Linux image all the time hasn't caused  
> problems, even in very busy student labs.

As I understand it, a job would still get evicted from condor under
virtual-box, when windows started to be used by a user again (so all
of the cpu would be available to user when needed).

How does this work with memory usage? Under virtual-box + linux combination,
does it balloon or it is always pre-allocated? (my experience is - pre-allocated,
but it could have changed recently)

Main reason for all this is, that hopefully some time 1st half of next year,
we will be doing pilot of condor in one of the better labs, and I want
to make it's effect invisible to the students using that lab. Sometimes
they have large memory requirements for their research, that is the main
reason why I cannot have pre-allocated big chunk of ram to a vm all the time.

> P.S. coLinux should be detecting user presence. We were using this  
> functionality before switching to VirtualBox (and it is implemented in  
> our current releases, but is getting increasingly difficult to  
> implement with each new version of Windows).

Oops, maybe this escaped my attention, I only noticed this when I had
a co-linux console open and using it - so co-linux would detect presence
of host windows user, even if co-linux runs as service (i.e. the user
is using windows, but co-linux "knows")?

Kind regards,

Vladimir Konrad

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