Re: [HTCondor-users] VirtualBox: Guest user vs. Condor account!?!

["Smith, Ian" <I.C.Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After spending much time on VirtualBox I did think up a workaround
for this but haven't had time to try it fully. It would go something like:

I set up a vanilla universe execute host and configure
it with a cron that will launch the VM. This will start it as
user SYSTEM which definitely does work (may be it is possible
to run as a less privileged user e.g. guest). It's easy to
check if a VM process is already running before launching
a new one but I found that I couldn't actually run more than
one VM concurrently anyway which is a nice safety net. 

The START policy could be enforced by the cron e.g. only start
a VM if the load is low (you can get this from condor_status -direct
addressed to the startd). I actually prefer "only start a VM if
there is no-one logged on"). The VM will also need to check
on local use and shutdown if it becomes significant (again
condor_status -direct can provide the host load average). It could
also if no more Condor VM jobs seem to be being sent.

This is pre-supposes that you have the VM image preinstalled
but this could be sent by a normal Condor job. The cron would
then launch the VM using the VM image present in the execute directory/folder
The job itself would do something like:

1. unpack the VM image etc
2. wait for the cron to start the VM 
3. wait for the VM to shutdown

(some timeouts might need to be added).

This is pretty obfuscated but I think it should work.

Any comments ?

regards,

-ian.

---------------

Dr Ian C. Smith,
Advanced Research Computing,
University of Liverpool, UK.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: htcondor-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:htcondor-users-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cotton, Benjamin J
> Sent: 19 November 2012 13:50
> To: htcondor-users@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [HTCondor-users] VirtualBox: Guest user vs. Condor
> account!?!
> 
> On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 06:57 -0600, Matt Renzelmann wrote:
> > If the VM universe does not support anything newer than VMware Server
> > 1.0 images
> 
> We've used relatively recent version of VMWare Workstation with the VM
> universe after patching the vmware plugin. The link[1] to the patch is
> below. I can't promise that it still works, but as of about a year ago
> it worked on both Windows and Linux hosts.
> 
> As for VirtualBox, there was a presentation at Condor Week a few years
> ago about using VirtualBox at Marquette University. I don't know if
> that gentleman is still on the list, but if not you might be able to
> find useful information in his archived presentation.
> 
> [1] http://web.rcac.purdue.edu/boilergrid/windows/condor_vm_vmware.diff
> 
> --
> Ben Cotton
> Purdue University
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