VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing

[Mike Haudenschild <mi...@longsight.com>]

Hello to all.  I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL
implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5
separate servers.  I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv
archive, but I have two burning questions:

1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing
capabilities per se as part of the scheduler.  How does VCL equalize the
load of virtual machines across several hypervisors?

2. I've found that the "free" VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one
physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare
license alongside VCL?

I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team
can provide!

Regards,
Mike

--
*Mike Haudenschild*
Education Systems Manager
Longsight Group
(740) 599-5005 x809
mike@longsight.com
www.longsight.com

RE: VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing

["Waldron, Michael H" <mw...@email.unc.edu>]

Mike,

1. I'm not aware of a load balancing capability in the VCL, in terms of spreading out reservations on servers across hypervisors. Although we have 224 VMs in our environment spread across 24 vmhosts, and the randomness of it seems to suffice. We don't have the VM's assigned in order, i.e. vm1-vm8 on vmhost1, vm9-vm16 on vmhost2, etc. They're all kind of mixed up, not sure if that helps the randomness or not. Maybe someone else on the list has a clever way of doing it.

2. We are using the free version of VMware ESXi 4.1, and it licenses 2 physical CPUs (1-6 cores each), so we get 12 cores per machine, which is the max we have anyway.



Mike Waldron
Systems Specialist
ITS Research Computing
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB #3420, ITS Manning, Rm 2509
919-962-9778
________________________________
From: Mike Haudenschild [mike@longsight.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 4:06 PM
To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org
Subject: VCL andVMWare licensing/load balancing

Hello to all.  I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5 separate servers.  I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv archive, but I have two burning questions:

1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing capabilities per se as part of the scheduler.  How does VCL equalize the load of virtual machines across several hypervisors?

2. I've found that the "free" VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare license alongside VCL?

I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team can provide!

Regards,
Mike

--
Mike Haudenschild
Education Systems Manager
Longsight Group
(740) 599-5005 x809<tel:%28740%29%20599-5005%20x809>
mike@longsight.com<ma...@longsight.com>
www.longsight.com<http://www.longsight.com>