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

On 11/21/2012 8:56 AM, Rob wrote:

Interesting, but this workaround is almost another job management
system on top of Condor....

In order to attach a disk image file to a VirtualBox VM, Condor
needs to run the VBoxManage.exe, which it cannot for some reason....

Moreover, not every Condor submit requires a VM from VirtualBox.
So I don't think it is a good idea to always fire off a VM whenever
a machine goes in idle mode.....
The thing might become even more complex with machines from
a multicore PC......

I believe, VM in Condor needs some serious rethinking, as people
seem to be not using it anymore?

Rob.



Hi Rob -
I think a big part of the issue is most of the VM universe users/interest in the past has come from folks on Linux. In addition, as the number of hypervisors has mushroomed, we started to leverage libvirt for HTCondor's VM universe implementation on Linux - but libvirt server is not available on Windows. Also, most of the VM universe users we have worked with are moving away from vmware and towards KVM. Thus on Windows we need to pick and choose which hypervisors to support - we do not have enough effort at UW to support an entire array of hypervisors on Windows. We are hoping to update VM universe on Windows to at least support current VMWare offerings - see ticket 
  https://htcondor-wiki.cs.wisc.edu/index.cgi/tktview?tn=740
Would that be helpful? Have you tried out using the update Purdue posted here w/ VMware on Windows? If others in the open source community w/ software development skills are interested in adding support for others such as VirtualBox on Windows, let us know... 

regards,
Todd







----- Original Message -----
From: "Smith, Ian" <I.C.Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: 'HTCondor-Users Mail List' <htcondor-users@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: [HTCondor-users] VirtualBox: Guest user vs. Condor account!?!

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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--
Todd Tannenbaum <tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx> University of Wisconsin-Madison
Center for High Throughput Computing   Department of Computer Sciences
HTCondor Technical Lead                1210 W. Dayton St. Rm #4257
Phone: (608) 263-7132                  Madison, WI 53706-1685