Beowulf Cluster with Xen on IBM bladecenter for Private Virtual Machine Farm
 

I'm probably dreaming, but I have a hobby project in mind that I would like feed back on.

I have an opportunity to purchase a 3 year old fully populated (14 x 3Ghz dual Xeon nodes) IBM bladecenter relatively inexpensively.

I thought it would be fun to set it up as a beowulf cluster with open source xen and test the market to see what people would pay for Private virtual machines.

My thoughts are to use 64 bit Centos 5 as a base to get the beowulf cluster up and then load xen.

I haven't really looked at the market but I figure I should be able to run 50 private virtual machines charging say $50 per month. I figure I can use rsync to backup the virtual machines to a different location. I plan to connect to linux based Network Storage running 3 x sata 1TB drives, probably via iSCSI. Along with the drive capacity currently on the blades I should get 2-3Tb online capacity over a Gbit network. (Cisco 14 + 4 network switch module)

I realise I have a bit of setup work to do and before I go investing a lot of time and a little money I'd appreciate some pragmatic advice as to why this may be a stupid venture.

What about this?

xen cluster
 

have you found the way to build the beowulf cluster?
i would love to hear if any had been successfull in building the cluster and run virtual servers on it.
currently reading and planning to implement this: http://www.asplund.nu/xencluster/xen-cluster-howto.html
hmm, visited it and browse about it, and found that they probably use single high performance server to create farm of virtual machines
http://www.vr.org/technology/technology-overview/

Hey! I was wondering about building a Xen cluster by following the above link. Do you know if it still works on latest Ubuntu version?

This thread had been closed for SEVEN YEARS...can't you have researched it, and made your own determination?

The steps are generic, and you could have just TRIED them.