[Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

[Bill Bryce]

It works but honestly I can't say it is 'production'.  If you are
interested in the 'roll' it is located at:

 http://www.osgdc.org/project/kusu/wiki/RocksRoll

We tried it with Rocks 4.1 (not Rocks 4.2) and Platform OCS
(http://my.platform.com/products/platform-ocs)

The roll takes the existing rocks repository on the frontend and builds
a vnfs image out of it for the compute nodes.  It also turns off the
standard rocks DHCP and PXE changes and replaces them with warewulf...it
isn't pretty but it does work.  

Regards, 

Bill.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Shook [mailto:eric-shook at uiowa.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 12:28 PM
To: Bill Bryce
Cc: Michael Will; Buccaneer for Hire.; beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

Hi Bill,

I will try to email them and let everyone know what they have to say.

How did the Rocks -> warewulf conversion go?

Thanks,
Eric

Bill Bryce wrote:
> Hi Eric,
> 
> You may want to send the Perceus guys an email and ask them how hard
it
> is to replace cAos Linux with RHEL or CentOS.  I don't believe it
should
> be that hard for them to do....we modified Warewulf to install on top
of
> a stock Rocks cluster effectively turning a Rocks cluster into a
> Warewulf cluster - and the cluster was running RHEL....so it is
> possible.
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Bill.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
> On Behalf Of Michael Will
> Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 7:15 PM
> To: Eric Shook; Buccaneer for Hire.
> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: RE: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
> 
> Scyld CW4 is based on RHEL4 and also supported on Centos 4. That does
> not give you different
> operating systems though, just flexible deployment of RHEL4 based HPC
> compute nodes. 
> 
> Note that we had to reimplement the PXE boot part to allow reasonable
> scaling. 
> 
> Michael
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
> On Behalf Of Eric Shook
> Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2006 11:28 AM
> To: Buccaneer for Hire.
> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
> 
> Not to diverge this conversation, but has anyone had any experience
> using this pxe boot / nfs model with a rhel variant?  I have been
> wanting to do a nfs root or ramdisk model for some-time but our
software
> stack requires a rhel base so Scyld and Perceus most likely will not
> work (although I am still looking into both of them to make sure)
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Eric Shook
> 
> Buccaneer for Hire. wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>   
>>> I agree with what Joe says about a few hundred nodes being the time 
>>> you would start to look closer at this approach.
>>>     
>> I have started to explore the possibility of using this technology
> because I would really like to see us with the ability to change OSs
and
> OS Personalities as needed.  The question I have is with 2000+ compute
> nodes what kind of infrastructure do I need to support this?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  
>>
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-- 
Eric Shook (319) 335-6714
Technical Lead, Systems and Operations - GROW
http://grow.uiowa.edu