This question comes up quite often, and the answer is For UniCluster yes and UniCloud 'partial'.
UniCluster can be completely installed in a virtual machine environment. The UniCluster primary installer node can be installed in a virtual machine and the compute nodes can also be installed in a virtual machine. the only area where problems can occur is the DHCP server. Typically VMWare or Xen based virtualization solutions will include a DHCP server for the virtual machines that automatically assigns IPs to virtual machines as they start. This DHCP server causes problems with UniCluster so when you are creating the network interfaces for the virtual machines in the cluster all of the compute nodes and one of the interfaces on the Installer node must be configured on a custom virtual network. The custom virtual networks do not have a DHCP server so when nodes are PXE booting UniCluster will provide an IP address for the nodes.
UniCloud cannot be completely installed in a virtual environment. The UniCloud installer node can be installed in a virtual machine but any hypervisor machines that are created must be installed on physical servers and not in virtual machines...if you accidentally install a hypervisor on a virtual machine it will 'seem to work' however when you try to install a virtual machine on the hypervisor that is installed on a virtual machine it will fail.
In an upcoming post I will describe how to create a complete virtual cluster using UniCluster on VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion.
Regards,
Bill.
