[arch-general] Virtualization accross hardware border

[Wolfgang Mader]

On 02/09/2016 12:30 AM, Damian Nowak wrote:
>> 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.

Thanks for your answer. I still try to wrap my head around the topic, so 
some of my assumptions my not hold. To me it sounds, that the proposed 
approach only works for web-apps running in a http-server, since the 
load balancing is done via HAProxy and nginx.

For my needs, I want to run "usual" software, specifically R, the 
statistics language. Utlimately, I want to bind several physical hosts 
together to appear as one host on OS level, such that e.g. htop would 
show the total number of cores accross all bound boxes.

>