[Beowulf] anyone using SALT on your clusters?

[Christopher Samuel]

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On 28/06/13 08:39, Mark Hahn wrote:

> why the big deal about cf-engine/salt/puppet/chef/etc?

Well with xCAT (which we use) the big thing is node auto-discovery and
naming. If we physically replace a node we remove its MAC address from
xCAT and when we turn it on it boots into a discovery image, gets
named based on its switch port (via a system you define to it),
programs the BMC/IMM appropriately and then lights up its attention light.

When we brought up our new Intel system recently we just plugged it
in, turned it on and waited for all the little blue lights to come on
to say it was appropriately configured. :-)

We can then use rpower to reboot it and it will come up in the
appropriate image.

> to me, a sensible cluster is nfs-root based, so there is hardly
> ever any mass-configuration to do.

With xCAT our diskfull nodes are not mass configured either,
everything is done by node groups which have associated "osimage"
definitions.  We have node groups for login nodes, compute nodes, GPFS
NSD servers, TSM HSM nodes, TSM backup nodes, BG/Q service nodes, etc..

So we can have a library of osimage definitions and switch groups
between them.

All the best,
Chris
- -- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci

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