Hi,
I've been tasked with building a test cluster here at Glasgow from some old equipment that we have floating around. The idea is to put together a system so we can test out software updates etc before rolling them into the production environment (such as the EMI2 WN discussed today in Ops) and also as a new grid admin it gives me more familiarity with the systems and middleware we have in place. I'm taking the opportunity to try and start from scratch so we can experiment with stuff that might make the production cluster easier to manage.
To begin with I'm auditing methods of automated machine provisioning, in my past life looking after HPC systems I've used commercial tools such as Bright Cluster Manager as well as tools like Cobbler etc for getting from bare metal to a live linux machine. Presently we use a custom set of tools that build our nodes via kickstart but I wanted to ask what methods you guys have used and had success with.
The follow-up question is then what you have had success in using for configuration management. In following conversation in Ops I know there is a strong leaning towards Puppet as well as sites that use cfengine.
Any comments, advice, experience you have would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks all,
Gareth
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