In a server room..do all the servers function as one server? Is it like a bunch of computers doing the same think (like a cluster supercomputer) and how do they communicate with each other?
I have been looking everywhere on the internet but I still can't figure out how server rooms work.
in a server room..do all the servers function as one server?
In your closet where you store your clothes, do all the trowsers work like one trowers?
The definition of a server room is: A room for servers. Mostly to keep them in a controlled environment (cooled, controlling who can steal them etc.).
There is NOTHING more in the definition of a server room. It is simply a room for servers.
That depends on the particular group of servers you're looking at. It could be Ethernet, Infiniband, FibreChannel, fiber optics -- practically anything connecting the servers together.
Usually servers perform distinct tasks unless you are really talking about a cluster designed to be a supercomputer (though VMWare & friends has blurred that line recently because a given workload can be moved around between different physical servers with impunity). Applications which wish to make full use of the processing power offered by that many machines needs to be specifically engineered to allow distributed computing of that sort -- they operate just as if you'd install that application on hundreds of desktop machines.
Really, there's little difference between desktop hardware and server hardware except that server hardware is much more expensive, and much more reliable, and much faster.
All the servers in one server room are merely sharing in a facility that is (well should be) optimal for server use - a secure, temperature controlled environment, ideally with fire suppression and environmental monitoring.
They might or might not be working together in a cluster. More likely is that while there might well be machines in some kind of cluster arrangement in a server room, it would only be some of them, not all of them. Possibly these days its more common than people might think at first if one considers all the host servers in a virtualisation array as "clustered together" doing the same thing.
There's nothing inherent in a server room that makes a difference one way or another as to whether or not all or some of the servers inside it are in a cluster.
