[Linux-cluster] SSI, Virtual Servers, ShareRoot, Etc

[isplist at logicore.net]

Figured I would start another thread so as not to lose this topic under 
another. 

I want to try to explain what it is that I need. Since I'm not an industry 
guy, I don't know all of the terms so apologies if I confuse anyone. 

What I badly need right now is a shared root style system. Perhaps where all 
nodes boot from the FC SAN using their HBA's and all have access to GFS 
storage all around the network. 

There are various reasons I would like to do this but one of them also 
includes trying to save on power. Say I took 32 machines and was able to get 
them all booting off the network without drives, then I could use a 12 drive 
FC chassis as the boot server. 

What I had worked on last year was partitioning one of these chassis into 32 
partitions, one for each system but I think there is a better way and, maybe 
even gaining some benefits. The problem with that was that partitions were 
fixed and inaccessible as individual partitions once formatted on the storage 
chassis. A shared root system would be better because then I don't have to 
have fixed partitions, just files. Then, each node would have it's storage 
over other storage chassis on the network. This is what I would like to 
achieve, so far, without success.

On another train of thought, I was wondering about the following. Would there 
be any benefit in creating an SSI cluster made up of x number of servers. 
Then, slicing that up into VM's as required. The SSI would always be intact as 
it is, the servers could come and go as needed, the storage would be separate 
from the entire mix. If one node needed more processing power than the rest, 
it would take it from the SSI cluster. Otherwise, idle machines are wasting 
their resources. 

Again, this is just a theory based on my tiny understanding of SSI clusters 
and VM to begin with but it's kind of an outline of what I'd like to achieve. 
The reason of course is that then I would have a very scalable environment 
where very little goes to waste, resources can be used where needed, not 
wasted.

Mike