Mellanox Announces Infiniband OFED Driver for VMware(R) Infrastructure 4.0

First release of the VMWare vSphere 4.0 (ESX 4.0) was not supported majority of Infiniband devices which has Mellanox chips. ESX 3.x users stayed their good old version.

Finaly Mellanox Technologies announced IB drivers for their ConnectX(R) based adapter cards with VMWare ESX/ESXi Server environment. The driver also supports Mellanox Technologies InfiniHost(R) III (mthca) adapters. The sources of this package are based on Linux OFED 1.4.1.

Supported Host Channel Adapters (HCAs)

• InfiniHost® III Ex (MemFree: Firmware fw-25218 Rev 5.3.000)
• InfiniHost® III Ex (With memory: Firmware fw-25208 Rev 4.8.200)
• InfiniHost® III Lx (firmware fw-25204 Rev 1.2.000)
• ConnectX® (firmware fw-25408 / fw-ConnectX Rev 2.6.000 and above )
• ConnectX®-2 (firmware fw-ConnectX2 Rev 2.7.000 and above)

ESX 4.0 drivers can be downloaded at their web site.

Penguin Computing Announces Release of New Scyld ClusterWare “Hybrid”

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing solutions, announced today that Scyld ClusterWare™ "Hybrid", the newest version of its industry-leading cluster management software, will be released in January of 2010. Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid was developed as a solution for Penguin Computing's Scyld customers who want to provision, monitor and manage heterogeneous operating systems from a single point of control.

Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid is a fully integrated cluster management environment that combines Scyld ClusterWare's industry leading diskless single-system-image architecture with a traditional provisioning architecture that deploys an operating environment to local disk. Combining the "best of both worlds," this hybrid approach provides unmatched flexibility and transparency. Compute nodes can still be booted with Scyld ClusterWare and provisioned extremely rapidly, with a minimal memory footprint and guaranteed consistency, or can be provisioned with a complete operating environment to the local hard drive.

With Scyld ClusterWare Hybrid, target operating environments can be dynamically assigned to cluster nodes at start-up time, allowing for the quick re-purposing of systems according to workload and user demand. Once provisioned, systems can be managed from a single node with a single subset of commands, accelerating the learning curve for new users and reducing the time spent on system management for system administrators and researchers tasked with cluster management.

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