From: Vuko Brigljevic > > Hello, > > This is a general design question to the OSCAR > developers. > > Is there a possibility or are people thinking about > the ability to define slave image servers in OSCAR?
While the capability isn't currently supported by OSCAR, the requisite capabilities are present in the tool set. > We are planning a system with over 2'000 hosts that > we are considering to manage with OSCAR (a very small > scale prototype of our farm is already running with > OSCAR and we are rather happy so far) but we don't > deem it reasonable to let all nodes boot from the > same node for a number of reasons but would rather > group smaller subfarms around a set of OSCAR image > servers. On the other side, we don't want either to > have to manage these OSCAR subfarms independently, > each with its own independent installation and > management, since they have a lot of things in > common. So arises naturally the desire to have > a central OSCAR master where one could define > several images (not all nodes in the 2000 have the > same function in our system and different > configurations are needed) which could delegate to > slave servers the management of a subset of nodes. The DHCP configuration can be set up to present different image servers to different subnets of nodes -- partitioning of clients to image servers. The partitions could be based on hardware, function, or image equivalence classes, subnets, physical proximity, or any other arbitrary scheme. Having partitioned the clients, the "slave" image servers could be synched with a "master" image server so that the content of the slaves are defined by the, or derived from, master. SystemImager et al could be used to maintain the slave servers. None of this would not impact the ability to maintain images either by direct manipulation of the images, or by pulling an image from a client. As I write this, I can envision a few implementation schemes, depending on the details of your configuration. > AFAIK OSCAR doesn't allow for slave servers at > the moment, correct me if I'm wrong. Is there > anything in the works to allow for such a feature? > I would think it very desirable. While there is nothing in the current plan, I do agree that this is desirable. Better yet, I see the capabilities present in the underlying tool set, permitting one to actually support such a scheme until the capabilities were explicitly present in OSCAR. There are certainly some issues to be dealt with, but I don't see any as insurmountable. -- David N. Lombard My comments represent my opinions, not those of Intel. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive? Does it help you create better code? SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help YOU! Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/ _______________________________________________ Oscar-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users
