[Infrastructures] Re: How do you manage 1000+ systems

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 03:32:27PM -0400, Ken Beer wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience with xCAT, wareWulf or wareCAT (xCAT
> using wareWulf); It's supposedly a way of managing 10000+ nodes by
> diskless booting linux images. Here's the presentation I just heard:

I've started experimenting a bit with Warewulf in my free time, which
came highly recommended from several folks.  It is normally used for
HPC Beowulf clusters, not servers or desktops.  So far, my initial
(tentative) evaluation is that it's a good tool surrounded by a small
but active and helpful community.  But, it's sure a good thing they're
helpful, because it currently suffers from a rather SEVERE lack of
documentation.

Some of Warewulf's main technical attractions are:

1. It makes managing homogeneous or mildly heterogenous nodes much
easier, via diskless RAM-disk (primarily) and/or NFS mounted (if
desired) root images, and utilities for managing same.  It's fairly
close to plug and play.

2. It consists of simply a set of packages which you can install, in
principle, on ANY Linux distribution, and which in practice are well
supported on two or four rpm-based distributions (with some noises
about Debian support).  For greater flexibility and easy and speed of
updates it is intentionally NOT itself a Linux distribution, in
contrast to Beowulf distributions like Scyld.

See also:

  http://warewulf.lbl.gov/pmwiki/
  http://caosity.org/

I'd heard of xCAT before but am not at all familiar with it.  About
the only thing I know is that, "xCAT is a complete diskfull solution
for large HPC clusters" - which I guess means it does installs on the
node hard disks, while Warewulf does not.  Off the cuff, it sounds
more broadly focused than Warewulf (and thus perhaps more complex?).
Google is your friend:

  http://www.xcat.org/
  http://www.liniac.upenn.edu/software/xcatdocs/warewulf-HOWTO.html
  http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xCAT/

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp@piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/