Gerald Davies wrote:
I'm new to posting, however, i do read the list :)
John's comment about the short support lifetime of FC raises one of my
concerns about distros and cluster set-ups in general. In my
department we have RH/FC based clusters. When purchased they came
with a pre-installed distro and have pxeboot/images. I then spent
time tuning them to our needs.
My questions relating to this are:
i) Is the practice of buying clusters with pre-installed distros
popular?
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.
Hi Gerald:
I do think you should have your own installation process. However, this
should be a general process based off of your requirements (e.g., you
want to install over a network and have nightly security updates). Of
course, you will benefit if the process is implemented using tools that
are not distribution/vendor-specific since you will then be free to (or
more likely to be able to) use that infrastructure in the future without
being tied to any specific supplier. A common example is using
PXE/tftp/dhcp for installs and yum for updates. Ideally, you would find
a vendor who understands the value of that approach and will provide
that infrastructure as an added value to the customer. Otherwise, if
you are able (time-wise), it certainly is a good learning experience to
set these things up (if you don't already know how).
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.
Of course we have our nightly security/errata updates on all of our
nodes (using yum). As for actually upgrading our distribution (we use
Scientific Linux), we do not mind updating minor revisions since this
can actually be done from yum. When a major new version comes out, it
is sometimes the case that there is no "upgrade" path so we must
reinstall systems completely. However, before we do that, all of the
physics software that our users rely upon (and there is a lot of it)
undergoes a certification process to be sure it works on the latest
version (this is a major event). Critical software on our storage
clusters undergoes a similar process. As you can see our upgrade
timelines are governed mostly by security and compatibility with our
critical applications. Typically, when we buy new compute nodes, we run
our latest certified distribution on it to check for hardware
compatibility before we make a purchase; therefore, our distro upgrade
timeline is not typically tied to kernel hardware support.
Hope this was helpful,
Gary
Apologies if this sounds like a strange first post :)
Cheers,
Gerald
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