Re: [Condor-users] Pool Of Virtual Boxes

[Ian Cottam <Ian.Cottam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a small problem with POVB...

I added in to our test pool a Dell 760; the result was that VboxHeadless
would start and then quickly die. After a little while, I spotted that I
was asking for all cores (2) but VT-X was switched off in the Dell 760's
BIOS.

I switched to requesting 1 core and it worked fine.

However,  after I set VT-X in the BIOS and reinstalled POVB I still can't
get both cores: that is, the above problem behaviour still occurs.

cheers
-Ian








On 01/04/2011 13:52, "David J. Herzfeld" <david.herzfeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>Hi Kevin:
>
>On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 11:09 +1300, Kevin.Buckley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> The apparent lack of (mis)interaction with the host system is
>> interesting.
>
>I am sure that the Vbox is affecting our machines in some way (the
>memory usage probably being at the forefront). However, povb is
>installed on undergraduate lab machines where students don't know that
>we are running a VM in the background. It seems that naive users who
>aren't looking for a performance impact don't feel like the system is
>running slower than normal.
>
>> 
>> Would PoVB (I'm sure it should be a small "o" in "of") allow for
>> a one-off installtion of a VM by our central facilitator over
>> which we, in the Comp Sci School, would then have the ability
>> so as to facilitate the needs of the grid users.
>
>This was the reason for designing povb. Create an installer that Windows
>sysadmins could use and then let the researchers decide how to use the
>facility (via condor configuration and Linux OS config). The images that
>are provided on sourceforge are generic - they are meant to be
>customized to suite the needs of the researchers (by installing
>additional software, etc).
>
>> Furthermore, given that some users have become used to recompiling
>> the UNIX codes with Cygwin so as make use of the existing facility,
>> what happens when/if you have a Condor Grid of PoVB VMs using the
>> same hardware as a grid running on the Windows hosr?
>
>While we have not looked specifically at this use-case, I don't see any
>problem with running the two systems side-by-side (noting that the
>Windows-Cygwin system would always "win" over the vbox system). Since
>povb is, by default, monitoring non-povb cpu useage, the povb slots
>would go into the owner state when a cygwin job is running. The only
>downside, as noted by others, is that you need to assign some amount of
>memory to the Vbox machine, which could impact "large memory"
>cygwin/windows jobs.
>
>DJH
>
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-- 
Ian Cottam
ext. 61851
IT Services for Research
Faculty of EPS
The University of Manchester