Hi - hope this is the right place to raise this question...

I currently run lam-6.5.9 (yes I know it's old - but so is the hardware it runs on) on a 6 node cluster. The highest spec box is probably only a celeron 333 with 128Mb RAM. All are using Slackware 7.1.

My company now think it might be better to buy a higher spec machine and run the cluster as 4-6 virtual machines. This gives rise to 2 questions:

1) Is this a sensible approach - it would certainly save electrical power but fundamentally running a cluster as 6 VMs on one box sounds paradoxical to me - surely easier to amend the code and make use of the new box's power. However there are 2500+ lines of code which would need to be changed - not something we have time to do.

2) If it is a sensible approach - I've heard that the networking involved getting each vm to talk to each other is quite complicated (we're thinking of VirtualBox running on Ubuntu) - has anyone attempted this and if so is there a tutorial out there anywhere?

Cheers

Rob