[Beowulf] cluster deployment and config management

[Stu Midgley]

I'm not feeling much love for puppet.

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 7:51 AM, Christopher Samuel <samuel at unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:

> On 05/09/17 15:24, Stu Midgley wrote:
>
> > I am in the process of redeveloping our cluster deployment and config
> > management environment and wondered what others are doing?
>
> xCAT here for all HPC related infrastructure.  Stateful installs for
> GPFS NSD servers and TSM servers, compute nodes are all statelite, so a
> immutable RAMdisk image is built on the management node for the compute
> cluster and then on boot they mount various items over NFS (including
> the GPFS state directory).
>
> Nothing like your scale, of course, but it works and we know if a node
> has booted a particular image it will be identical to any other node
> that's set to boot the same image.
>
> Healthcheck scripts mark nodes offline if they don't have the current
> production kernel and GPFS versions (and other checks too of course)
> plus Slurm's "scontrol reboot" lets us do rolling reboots without
> needing to spot when nodes have become idle.
>
> I've got to say I really prefer this to systems like Puppet, Salt, etc,
> where you need to go and tweak an image after installation.
>
> For our VM infrastructure (web servers, etc) we do use Salt for that. We
> used to use Puppet but we switched when the only person who understood
> it left.  Don't miss it at all...
>
> cheers,
> Chris
> --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>
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-- 
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at gmail.com
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