I dream of a day where virtualization is pervasive.
Instead of thinking about services in terms of servers, CPUs or directly mapped resources, I should be able to to add virtual machines in terms of guaranteed throughput rate over a whole grid. Scaling out should be as easy as adding a blade or racking another server.
At the low level, I should have the option of running N+N redundancy. That is, the VM should run in lockstep across multiple machines – so if it is running on 2 vcpus, 4 in total would be used. This would allow for any node to fail. And the VM should be an aggregate of the low level hardware – e.g. a VM grid across 4 8-core servers should scale near-linearly when a single OS instance is running 32 processes.
Current solutions only attempt to do some of the tasks above, and most fail miserably. IBM mainframes have been doing it for ages.
If I had the time, I know I could build software to do this better than anyone else. All the puzzle pieces are there, especially the tough ones like hypervisors and Infiniband. This could have been done at least 3 years ago. I bet it will take the industry 3-4 years yet to get anywhere close.
This is a real virtual datacenter.
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You mean like VMware Fault Tolerance?
This is the closest that the commercial sector has to offer at the moment. It still doesn’t do single system image clustering to the best of my knowledge. I know VMWare has a scheduler that will move VMs around from host to host though, but is there any way to aggregate computing resources together?
I think Xen or KVM tightly coupled with SSI would be the best means to do what I speak of.