[Beowulf] cluster os

[Christopher Samuel]

On 19/05/16 20:44, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:

> The upgrade in Debian is working really well. You really can
> install a machine once and then you can upgrade it to the latest
> OS without much issues. [...]

Agreed, Debian is great for this (which is why we're running it on our
infrastructure boxes).  It also doesn't tend to break things on point
releases, unlike Red Hat.

> This experience seems to be in stark difference from the OS upgrade on the 
> central cluster (RedHat) where the cluster needed to be installed from 
> scratch. At least that was my understanding. 

That's certainly true up to RHEL6, there is some ability to upgrade from
RHEL6 to RHEL7 now though (never tried it).

We're tied to RHEL due to hardware vendor support requirements. :-/

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