Diskless shared-root cluster: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:40, 31 January 2008

Revision as of 13:38, 20 April 2008

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A '''Diskless Shared-root Cluster''' is a way to easyly managed several machines at the same time. Instead of each having its own operating system (OS) on its local disk, there is only one image of the OS available on a server, and all the nodes use the same image. (SSI cluster = Single System Image)

A '''Diskless Shared-root Cluster''' is a platform for [[High Availability]] Infrastructures.

ButThe alsosimplest anway NFSis serverto onuse thea networkNFS may beserver, configured to host the generic boot image for the SSI cluster nodes. (dhcp + tftp + bootp or pxe + nfs)

A Linux cluster filesystem, e.g. [[Global File System|GFS]] or [[OCFS2]], is the basis to form a [[single-system image]] (SSI) on filesystem level with any attached [[Storage Area Network]] (SAN).

Although such NFS based Diskless Shared-root Cluster are not recommended for productive environments, NFS still could be used to build cheap cluster infrastructures for less important tasks. To ensure that there is no [[Single point of failure]], the NFS export for the boot-image should be hostet on a two node cluster.

But also an NFS server on the network may be configured to host the generic boot image for the SSI cluster nodes.

Although such NFS based Diskless Shared-root Cluster are not recommended for productive environments, NFS still could be used to build cheap cluster infrastructures for less important tasks. To ensure that there is no [[Single point of failure]], the NFS export for the boot-image should be hostet on a two node cluster.

The architecture of a [[diskless]] [[computer cluster]] makes it possible to separate servers and storage array. The operating system as well as the actual reference data (userfiles, databases or websites) are stored competitively on the attached storage system in a centralized manner. Any server that acts as a cluster node can be easily exchanged by demand.

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The additional abstraction layer between storage system and computing power eases the scale out of the infrastructure. Most notably the storage capacity, the computing power and the network bandwidth can be scaled independent from one another.

A Linux cluster filesystem, e.g. [[Global File System|GFS]] or [[OCFS2]], is the basis to form a [[single-system image]] (SSI) on filesystem level with any attached [[Storage Area Network]] (SAN).

Although such NFS based Diskless Shared-root Cluster are not recommended for productive environments, NFS still could be used to build cheap cluster infrastructures for less important tasks.

A similar technology can be found in the [[TruCluster]] ([[Tru64]]-UNIX) in the [[Unix]] sector.