The vSMP Foundation for Clusterâ„¢ solution provides a simplified compute architecture for high-performance clusters - it hides the InfiniBand fabric, offers built-in high-performance storage as a cluster-filesystem replacement and reduces the number of operating systems to one, making it much easier to administer. This solution is ideally suited for smaller compute implementations in which management tools and skills may not be readily available.
vSMP Foundation for Cluster enables the aggregation of up to 16 servers into a single virtual machine with up to 128 cores and 512GB of RAM – maximum of 32GB per node. vSMP Foundation for Cluster does supports Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processors with speeds no greater than 2.4GHz. If customers have clusters needs that exceed 512GB of memory or nodes with Xeon processor speeds exceeding 2.4GHz it is recommended that they purchase vSMP Foundation for SMP instead of the Cluster variant.
The target customers for the Cluster product are those with initial high performance cluster implementations who are concerned with the complexity of creation and management of the cluster environment.