[Beowulf] How do people keep track of computers in your cluster(s)?

Carsten Aulbert carsten.aulbert at aei.mpg.de
Sun Oct 21 07:29:49 PDT 2007


Hi all,

we are currently looking into the problem, how to keep track of
computers which we are going to buy. On the one hand there are the
standard tools to monitor a running cluster like ganglia, nagios,
zenoss, ... but these are - to my understanding - just for monitoring
the current status.

However, I would like to have something where we have something like a
large table about the hardware in question. In there information like

* vendor
* serial number
* MAC addresses (eth0, eth1,..., IPMI, RAID,...)
* maybe even firmware versions and serial numbers of exchangeable
internal hardware (hard disks)
* basically all physical information of the box

another table should hold the current setup, i.e. a mapping between the
hardware and the "logical" setup, e.g.

Hardware box number #1234 from above table has in the current setup the
following...

* hostname
* IP addresses
* running services
* ...

And finally, another table where special problems, like memory errors
and the like can be entered.

I know this sounds just like three medium sized SQL tables, but at least
I wanted to ask what people are using if more than a single person is
working on the cluster. One person can probably do this with a simple
text file and a set of papers in a filing cabinet.

Thanks a lot for any answers

Carsten




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