What cluster should i use?,Can i host VMs on HPC clusters?,What can i do with HPC clusters?

[Vishera]

I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to server stuff,so forgive me for that.

I have accumulated lots of hardware through out the years and interested in building a cluster of servers out of them (I want lots of CPU performance so a HPC cluster seems nice)

Hardware wise and software wise i have everything i need (I am using Windows Server 2019)

So,What do you guys think?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What hardware do you ave?

 

You can setup a cluster on most oses, like windows server 2019. Id personally run proxmox as a hypervisor on all the hardware, then you can manage vms from one control panel.

 

What software are you using?

[jj9987]

A cluster is just a bunch of servers joined into a single cluster, for one or more of the following purposes:

- High availability - when one physical node dies or is down for maintenance, move workloads to another one

- Redundancy - replicate data on multiple physical nodes

- Centralized management vs managing every physical node separately

- Scalability - need more resources? Just add another physical node to the cluster

- If your workload and clustering tool allow, you can spread your application over multiple physical nodes.

 

The word cluster can be used in many ways. A HPC cluster is different thing - it is generally used for high-performance computing, where you need everything to be high-performance - your CPU, your RAM, storage, I/O, networking (not just 1 Gbps but 20, 100 or 400 Gbps), GPUs/TPUs etc. Workloads that belong here are related to AI/ML, science/research experiments, financial calculations etc. It is a rather specific group of workloads.

 

If you want to just run VMs, you can setup a hypervisor and you're good to go. Got multiple physical machines? Set them up in high-availability, for example with Proxmox or ESXi.

 

Next it depends on what workloads you want to run. A good starting point would be https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted or /r/homelab (it's wiki and other helpful posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/5gz4yp/stumbled_into_rhomelab_start_here/

 

There's a lot of stuff you can do and learn. All comes down to what you want to do, what do you want to learn/try out.

[Vishera]

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What hardware do you ave?

 

A bunch of ivy bridge core i5 systems,

A few switches - It's all i need on the hardware side i think?

 

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What software are you using?

Microsoft HPC Pack 2019,

But i can use other software that comes with the OS for Failover clusters and other types.

 

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id personally run proxmox as a hypervisor on all the hardware, then you can manage vms from one control panel.

That looks like what i need for the cluster,

I just read on proxmox's forums that you can make a cluster like i want with it:

Quote

In the case of having 4 identical nodes as a HPC cluster the virtual machine can use all 4 resources instead of only the physical limit of one node.
E.g. a node has a 8 core CPU and 16 GB RAM the VM could use up to 24 Cores and 64 GB RAM.

Nevertheless Proxmox VE is a very nice solution for system virtualization.

Regards
Florian

 

20 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

If you want to just run VMs, you can setup a hypervisor and you're good to go. Got multiple physical machines? Set them up in high-availability, for example with Proxmox or ESXi.

I want VMs but with Scalability

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Microsoft HPC Pack 2019,

But i can use other software that comes with the OS for Failover clusters and other types.

What are you running with HPC Pack? Did you write a program you want to run on all the nodes?

 

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

A bunch of ivy bridge core i5 systems,

A few switches - It's all i need on the hardware side i think?

Depends on your exact goals, and what your program needs. Do you need shared storage?

 

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

want VMs but with Scalability

How do you want to scale? VM clusters make it easier to manage lots of nodes with their own vms.

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you running with HPC Pack? Did you write a program you want to run on all the nodes?

I didn't do anything with it yet.

 

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on your exact goals, and what your program needs. Do you need shared storage?

Yes,I need shared storage.

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How do you want to scale? VM clusters make it easier to manage lots of nodes with their own vms.

I want to make VMs that use a few nodes at the same time for performance (For example use 3 cores from node A and 3 cores from node B for a single VM)

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I want to make VMs that use a few nodes at the same time for performance (For example use 3 cores from node A and 3 cores from node B for a single VM)

Yea you can't do that really. The network is way to slow to do shared memory and share cores between vms. Each vm will be at max the size of the host.

8 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Yes,I need shared storage.

Whats the drive config of these nodes?

 

8 minutes ago, Vishera said:

didn't do anything with it yet.

What do you want to run? Normally you have to write the program or task with a cluster in mind. You can't just take a program written for one pc and run it on multiple systems normally.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Whats the drive config of these nodes?

 

Each one has a 1TB drive but i plan to add more in the future.

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What do you want to run? Normally you have to write the program or task with a cluster in mind. You can't just take a program written for one pc and run it on multiple systems normally.

I think i will just run a Failover Hyper-V cluster since it seems like what i want to do currently isn't not possible with HPC.

 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Vishera said:

Microsoft HPC Pack 2019,

But i can use other software that comes with the OS for Failover clusters and other types.

Failover clusters and HPC pack are entirely different things for different purposes. HPC pack doesn't have any applicability for VM hosting at all fyi.

 

3 hours ago, Vishera said:

I want VMs but with Scalability

So just to make it clear you cannot combine the hardware resources of multiple systems and create a VM to utilize/span across those systems. This is impossible outside of very specialized deployments and configurations and doing it badly will result in worse performance not better.

 

Microsoft HPC pack is a job scheduler which assigns compute jobs to compute instances in a cluster i.e. multiple VMs. So for example you could submit 14 jobs in to the queue and these would get assigned out to as many compute instances as you've allowed it to and/or as many instances you actually have.

 

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

I think i will just run a Failover Hyper-V cluster since it seems like what i want to do currently isn't not possible with HPC.

Correct HPC isn't want you want. However for HA/Failover VM hosting you need shared storage backend attached to every VM host server so you'll either need to make one of the systems a storage server (FreeNAS) or utilize Storage Spaces Direct however that requires Windows Server Datacenter Edition last I checked.