Cloud Computing - Multiple Physical Computers, One Logical Computer

Posted by Koobz on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Koobz
Published on 2010-04-29T16:11:19Z Indexed on 2010/04/29 16:17 UTC
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distributed-computing

I know that you can set up multiple virtual machines per physical computer. I'm wondering if it's possible to make multiple physical computers behave as one logical unit?

Fundamentally the way I imagine it working is that you can throw 10 computers into a facility one day. You've got one client that requires the equivalent of two computers worth, and 100 others that eat up the remaining 8. As demands change you're just reallocating logical resources, maybe the 2 computer client now requires a third physical system. You just add it to the cloud, and don't worry about sharding the database, or migrating data over to a new server.

Can it work this way?

If yes, why would anyone ever do things like partition their database servers anymore? Just add more computing resources. You scale horizontally with the hardware, but your server appears to scale vertically. There's no need to modify your application's infrastructure to support multiple databases etc.

Cloud Computing - Multiple Physical Computers, One Logical Computer

Posted by bundini on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by bundini
Published on 2010-04-29T16:16:43Z Indexed on 2010/04/29 16:27 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 387

Filed under:

cloud-computing

I know that you can set up multiple virtual machines per physical computer. I'm wondering if it's possible to make multiple physical computers behave as one logical unit?

Fundamentally the way I imagine it working is that you can throw 10 computers into a facility one day. You've got one client that requires the equivalent of two computers worth, and 100 others that eat up the remaining 8. As demands change you're just reallocating logical resources, maybe the 2 computer client now requires a third physical system. You just add it to the cloud, and don't worry about sharding the database, or migrating data over to a new server.

Can it work this way?

If yes, why would anyone ever do things like hand partition their database servers anymore? Just add more computing resources. You scale horizontally with the hardware, but your server appears to scale vertically. There's no need to modify your application's supporting infrastructure to support multiple databases etc.

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