# want to get practice in clusters setup

## KAMIKAZE_

hello. I have no idea how to setup cluster and do not have a hardware for it. Is it possible (or good idea) to setup virtual servers (at least two) on my laptop and then run them as one cluster? Feel free to leave links to manuals. Thanks

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## jormartr

It's a starting point, not bad for learning purposes.

What kind of cluster are you talking about? What is going to run there?

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## KAMIKAZE_

 *jormartr wrote:*   

> It's a starting point, not bad for learning purposes.
> 
> What kind of cluster are you talking about? What is going to run there?

 

I don't really know. What can you suggest to me? I mean what can I run on this "cluster"? I have Gentoo Linux ~amd64 on Turion64 x2 2.0GHz, 640GB HDD and 3GB RAM. I want to run something simple

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## upengan78

Hi,

For you I can tell you something, not that I have worked on gentoo cluster but yes, sun cluster - veritas clusters on solaris os.

What you can do is, install 2 Virtual machines on your system. allot resources accordingly from the Virtualization software like NICs. hard drives. you may have issues when you want to use shared storage - from where you get that? you can use 3 rd virtual machine and use ISCSI initiator/target to get shared storage for 2 cluster vms.

You can use VirtualBox - free on gentoo also.

Follow this link might help, http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/cluster/

If you know what is NFS then having High availability - HA NFS will be a great start

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## purplelama

I had the same idea, I fancied dabbling with clusters but had no idea about them or the HW to do anything about it. So I installed VirtualBox on my laptop and created 1 master node and 3+ slave nodes, all running Gentoo. I have tried netbooting the slave nodes and minimal installs on the slaves. I tried Kerrighed for a SSI cluster. Now I'm playing with pvfs and Open MPI, might start writing my own programme to try things out, if I get the time. I can thouroughly recommend this as a route to getting into all things Gentoo and clustering. Just create a Virtual Box snapshot before any major change then if it does not work you can just go back to it.

Just need to get some HW to put it into the real world   :Wink: 

Good luck.

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## solamour

On a related note, I'd like to solicit suggestions for the following case.

We started with a single server, which lasted for a while until it was pretty much overloaded to the max (more users, scarce disk space, etc). So we decided to get another server and moved half the team to the new server. Now we are maxed out again and in need of one more server.

Before splitting the team into 3 groups, I'd like to know if I can put all 3 servers into a pool of some sort, so that everyone logs into the same (virtual) server, and somehow the load is auto-magically distributed among the servers in the pool.

I'd welcome any suggestions.

__

sol

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## upengan78

How about using Hardware load balancer such as coyote point. You can put the servers behind the load balancer and in a private IP address space and then create cluster on hardware load balancer using their interface and set ratio such as 100:0 or 50:50 and so on... I'm not sure if you can have 3 systems in load balancer configuration  :Wink: 

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