Thanks! The low-effort VM clone (essentially fork() for Xen VMs, and only takes 1-2 seconds even for dozens of clones) makes deploying a bunch of almost-identic

Thanks! The low-effort VM clone (essentially fork() for Xen VMs, and only takes 1-2 seconds even for dozens of clones) makes deploying a bunch of almost-identical machines extremely easy. We've also toyed around with other cluster-scale platforms (see my earlier post) and have a MySQL Cluster HOWTO in the works, but the clustered SQL databases are decidedly more heavyweight - MySQL Cluster doesn't even allow removal of cluster nodes once they're added (without dropping all the clustered tables). Not sure if Oracle RAC has that capability - if so, we might be able to put together a fun demo.