> ii) Would it be better to develop our own installation process for
> clusters so that upgrades, in terms of distros, can be rolled out
> easily? I feel like i'm tied in some way to the supplier of our
> cluster for upgrades.
Hmmm.... you would be re-inventing this wheel, which has been
re-invented many times.
Yes and each person who re-invents the wheel then knows how a wheel
works and isn't stuck using the same wheel regardless of its
limitations. I'm a strong advocate of building your own install
method. 1) Its fun 2) its easy 3) Your learn a lot 4) you can
integrate your method into your own management style.
eg. we are able to do a rolling upgrade of our cluster without
downtime and without users even noticing. We have it tightly coupled
with our queueing software and when a node becomes free it gets
re-installed.
We also have our install process configured to allow booting different
distros/images, which is useful to boot diagnostic cd images etc.
> iii) Do people regularly upgrade their clusters in relation to
> distros? I guess this is like asking how long is a piece of string
> because everyone's needs are different.
Cluster upgrades are rare unless you are missing functionality or
something is broken. That is of course one opinion, some here do
upgrades nightly. From a purely production oriented viewpoint, where
downtime == lost money for our customers, we usually advise against that.
I think rare is a strong word. Infrequent may be better. We
regularly apply patches and upgrades to the front end nodes (globally
connected) and infrequently (~ every 6 months) upgrade all the cluster
nodes in the rolling fashon mentioned above.
You can even do a kernel upgrades to the file servers/front end nodes
(which requires a reboot) without killing or disrupting jobs. Having
complete control has a lot of benefits.
--
Dr Stuart Midgley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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