[arch-general] Virtualization accross hardware border

[Damian Nowak]

> if I understand the offering of Amazons cloud service correctly, there, you can install an
> OS, say arch, on a virtualized machine and scale CPU, RAM, etc. freely up and down just as
> you need it. 

Well, yes and no. You can scale up resources (e.g. increase RAM) but this requires a full
restart of your virtual machine. See:
https://serverfault.com/questions/591533/can-ec2-instances-dynamically-add-ram-while-running

Moreover, adding more and more resources will stop working at some point. That's why you'd
be looking to add several independent virtual machine running your application (Amazon
EC2), which connect to one big database (another Amazon EC2), and put all of those
computing machines in from of a load balancer (Amazon ELB).

> While I can to this using e.g. KVM+qemu on a single machine, I want to be able to bind
together a bunch of machines such that they appear as a single big machine. Is there a way
to do this?

You can achieve it with both solutions, is it Amazon (EC2+ELB), or your own dedicated
server(s) where you'll be likely to use KVM for virtualization and HAProxy, nginx or other
solutions for load balancing.

>From a technological point of view, both ways are the same.

-- 
Damian Nowak
CEO, Virtkick
www.virtkick.com