Look at www.scyld.com who do it with diskless lightweight compute nodes where /root is a local ramdisk populated at boottime through the headnode(s). It solves a lot of the issues you where mentioning.
Michael
Ps: I work for penguincomputing who owns scyld.
-----Original Message-----
From: isplist@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:isplist@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wed Jan 31 11:34:34 2007
To: linux-cluster
Subject: Re: Diskless Shared-Root GFS/Cluster
I'm thinking for application servers/cluster only, not workstation users.
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 11:10:55 -0800, Tom Mornini wrote:
> We boot from flash drives, then pivot root to SAN storage.
>
> I agree with no drives in servers, but shared root is a
> whole different ball game if you mean everyone using a
> single filesystem for root.
>
> --
> -- Tom Mornini, CTO
> -- Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails Hosting
> -- Reliability, Ease of Use, Scalability
> -- (866) 518-YARD (9273)
>
>
> On Jan 31, 2007, at 8:38 AM, isplist@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> Did you ever give it a try at all? I mean, isn't anything potentially
>> devastating if it becomes broken?
>>
>> In my case, it's silly to have drives running on every server and
>> then also
>> having centralized storage. It would save power, heat and another
>> level of
>> failure if I could use a sharedroot system.
>>
>> Of course, along the same lines, if it's too complex or finicky
>> then it might
>> not be worth the trouble... for now.
>>
>> Mike
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:26:02 -0800, Tom Mornini wrote:
>>> We strongly considered this when implementing our cluster
>>>
>>> infrastructure,
>>> but decided against it when we realized just how devastating *any*
>>> problem
>>> with that shared root would be...
>>>
>>> --
>>> -- Tom Mornini, CTO
>>> -- Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails Hosting
>>> -- Reliability, Ease of Use, Scalability
>>> -- (866) 518-YARD (9273)
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jan 30, 2007, at 11:39 PM, Marc Grimme wrote:
>>>
>>>> Mike,
>>>> On Tuesday 30 January 2007 17:50, isplist@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>>>> I saw a few posts from some working on this. Has anyone gotten
>>>>> this to work
>>>>> properly? My nodes simply do not need their hard drives, it's a
>>>>> waste of
>>>>> power and hardware since I have plenty of central storage. I would
>>>>> like to
>>>>> remove drives from nodes and boot the cluster diskless.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've seen the open shared-root project and such but those seem to
>>>>> be about
>>>>> building the entire cluster. Since I have the cluster going, I'm
>>>>> looking
>>>>> for information on how I can convert my nodes to diskless.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for any information you can provide.
>>>>>
>>>>> Mike
>>>> There are quite a some people (increasing every day) using open-
>>>> sharedroot
>>>> clusters in productive environments with loads of different
>>>> applications. I
>>>> also wrote a MiniHowto and some other docs (have a look at
>>>> www.open-sharedroot.org) to give assistance.
>>>>
>>>> As Mike Hagmann already stated it is not a trivial task to build up
>>>> such a
>>>> cluster (as it's not a trivialtask to build up any type of
>>>> productive
>>>> clusters, but isn't that a reason why we are doing all that ;-) )
>>>> but the
>>>> MiniHowto should help you on the one hand and on the other hand you
>>>> can get
>>>> more help from open-sharedroot or us at ATIX (www.atix.de). If you
>>>> like.
>>>> Feel free to ask.
>>>> Regards and have fun
>>>> Marc.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Linux-cluster mailing list
>>>>> Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx
>>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
>>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Gruss / Regards,
>>>>
>>>> ** Visit us at CeBIT 2007 in Hannover/Germany **
>>>> ** in Hall 5, Booth G48/2 (15.-21. of March) **
>>>>
>>>> Marc Grimme
>>>> Phone: +49-89 452 3538-14
>>>> http://www.atix.de/ http://www.open-sharedroot.org/
>>>>
>>>> **
>>>> ATIX - Ges. fuer Informationstechnologie und Consulting mbH
>>>> Einsteinstr. 10 - 85716 Unterschleissheim - Germany
>>>>
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>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
>>
>>
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