32-bit Support

[me2050]

Can 32-bit be supported for those legacy hardware?  A use case would be to leverage the retired low-cost 32-bit hardware.

[activesys]

We do not have currently such plans - mainly because of the following three reasons:

1) as of RHEL 5.4 support for KVM virtualization is only available for 64-bit - so 32-bit OpenNode would be a feature crippled anyway
2) 32-bit machines support only 4GB of memory for Hardware Node - you cant virtualize much on that
3) we dont have a spare budget to develop also 32-bit OpenNode version

BUT - if there will be enough interest and budget for that - we might do it - eg creating a 32-bit OpenVZ only OpenNode.
Development budget for that would be somewhere 3k EUR range.

[me2050]

1. Agreed, but it would be a nice feature to have options to choose OVZ, or KVM, or both, at the install time.  It's RHAT's decision to only support KVM virtualization for 64-bit, but KVM itself supports both x86 and x86_64.  KVM itself only requires Intel VT or AMD-V extension.

2. For a long time now, there is the PAE in 32bits CPU, alloowing the memory allocation to be done on 36bits.  A 32-bit Linux should be able to access 64GB of RAM, with the kernel compiled with smp enabled kernel-hugemem packages.  For example, VMware ESXi up to 3.5 is on 32-bit hardware, and it consumes much more than 4GB of RAM.

3. With the 32-bit support, OpenNode could reach out far broader communities.  As of now, amongst OpenStack/OpenNebula/OpenNode/Proxmox/VMware 4+, only OpenNebula support both x86 and x86_64 and has a huge install base as far as I know of.  BTW, OpenNebula also has a OVZ driver on their stack - http://wiki.opennebula.org/openvz4opennebula.  (Someone posted that CloudFoundry may run on 32-bit hardware, but I haven't got that far as of yet.)  IMHO, it would well worth carving out a budget to have OpenNode support both infrastructures.