I currently run 6 HP Servers (Old Dual Xeon Boxes) each running 6 VirtualBox Guests all managed with PHPVirtualBox. However I'd like to see if I can get this running as a cluster, i.e. All the Guests are run from one Machine\Frontend and the load is automatically shared amongst the servers.

I have looks at projects like OpenMosix etc. but they all look to be out of development and years old. Can anybody give me some pointers on where to start and where what I'm doing is achievable.

vbox is not for server virtualization, if you want load balancing, live migration etc, you need to look at oVirt and the likes

Sorry I guess I asked in the wrong area, which would be the best section to ask about setting up a vbox cluster??

again, vbox is not created for large setups, and was never built with the intention of being clustered. It is a means of starting up a couple of VMs on your localhost, a desktop virtualization product.

If you need to run a cluster of hypervisors with production server VMs or VDI, you need to be looking at higher end solutions, like KVM, Xen, VMWare etc. oVirt, the solution I suggested above, uses KVM on the hosts, and is very feature rich, providing exactly what you asked about - load balancing policies, live migration, maintenance mode for hosts and a lot more

Sorry I misunderstood I was thinking of Xen,KVM been used in webhosting type virtualisation, and not normally running XP type desktop enviroments. I'm into a field that is a bit out of my comfort zone to be honest, so I'm not 100% up on all the terminology and available packages yet.

I will investigate KVM and OVirt, and see how I get on. Thanks for the help and tolerating my ignorance.

Well that didn't last long The Test Servers are HP G3/G4 Xeon Servers, and it doesn't look like they have Intel-VT :-( The plan was to test with the old setup before spending money on a new rig.

ouch, can't use non-VT (or SVM) hardware these days.

What is it you're trying to build eventually?

I'm pulling some old data off a 10 year old 32bit Windows Application. The job is repetitive and time consuming. I have it scripted so that I can leave a copy of XP going more or less unattended. However it will take 1 copy of XP about 2 years to do the entire job. So I have 6 Copies running on each machine, and 6 machines giving 36 copies running. It should have it done in about a month :-) (When I finally get happy will the setup, and fire it off)

Right, then why do you need clusters and all that jazz? Just go on until you're done, and get rid of the old junk when you are

To be far that may well be the sensible way to do it, I was looking for an easier way to manage the setup, but as you say the additional expense may well not be worth it. On the other hand nowt wrong with new toys :-) And I'll have them for next time something like this comes up.