Question : Virtual hard drive and process threading. A question for the real gurus.

I recently purchased a business ADSL package with 3Mb up/down stream capacity. I also have a fedora core virtual server hosted by godaddy somewhere in arizona. Given these two components, do you know of any way to utilize the high bandwidth with virtual server storage space such that the virtual server could act like as a virtual hard drive? I already know how to cluster them together in linux for server redundancy, but I'd like to run windows x86 applications on the server and utilize the high bandwidth via my new ADSL so that the virtual server acts like a virtual harddrive whereby I can execute programs on the virtual server and use and thread the program processes either through the virtual server or on my own physical system. Any ideas? Would windows enterprise enable this kind of activity or would I still need to remote connect into the server and run all applications on server processer threads? I realize remoting is easy, but I want to maximize the utilization of my bandwidth up and down; and I want to maximize the utilization of my physical two node single threaded cluster. Any ideas are appreciated.

Answer : Virtual hard drive and process threading. A question for the real gurus.

When you talk about compiled windows exe, what exaclty are you thinking? some service like http, RDBMS or batch computing?

If you talk about services. You could build a load-balancing cluster, where both of your linux machines run an instance of windows via VMware. For a load-balancing cluster you need a load-balancing mechanism (either another piece of hardware or software eg round robin DNS).

If you are talking about batch computing, there are the so called Beowulf cluster, which basically aggregate computing resources of the linux/unix machines. I've never build such a thing, but you may research about it. However I think this will only run unix/linux binaries.

I know also that Microsoft has the Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server to implement the functionality you are looking for. You could potentially do the VMware thing to install windows, then install the Compute Cluster Server on top.

You can also explore the grid computing architecture, where a set of heterogeneous computer architectures and OSs share their CPU power to perform some computation. You need to install grid computing software that will leverage all the CPU power among your machines, for example Sun Grid Engine from Sun Microsystems.