Abstract
New virtualization solutions such as Xen allow users to execute hundreds of
virtual machines on a single physical machine. The interest of these solutions
have been proven for system isolation and security features, especially for
Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as well as for high performance computing.
A natural question is to know if it is possible to use all these virtual
machines at the same time, creating a virtual cluster. This might be an
interesting solution for the development and the experimentation of
cluster applications.
This document presents an extension of OSCAR for the deployment and the
management of Xen virtual machines. We also analyze in this paper the
interest of virtualization for the development, the testing and the
experimentation of applications for clusters, in particular with the use of a
fully virtualized cluster.