On 01/07/2011 08:16, Ryan Rawson wrote:
What's the justification for a management interface? Doesn't that increase complexity? Also you still twice the ports?
ILO reduces ops complexity. you can push things like BIOS updates out, boot machines into known states, instead of the slowly diverging world that RPM or debian updates get you into (the final state depends on the order, and different machines end up applying them in a different order), and for diagnosing problems when even the root disk doesn't want to come out and play.
In a big cluster you need to worry about things like not powering on a quadrant of the site simultaneously as boot-time can be a peak power surge; you may want to bring up slices of every rack gradually, upgrade the BIOS and OS, and gradually ramp things up. This is where HPC admin tools differ from classic "lock down an end user windows PC" tooling.
