On 06/27/2013 09:02 PM, Mark Hahn wrote: >>> why the big deal about cf-engine/salt/puppet/chef/etc? >> >> Well with xCAT (which we use) the big thing is node auto-discovery and >> naming. If we physically replace a node we remove its MAC address from >> xCAT and when we turn it on it boots into a discovery image, gets >> named based on its switch port (via a system you define to it), >> programs the BMC/IMM appropriately and then lights up its attention light. >> >> When we brought up our new Intel system recently we just plugged it >> in, turned it on and waited for all the little blue lights to come on >> to say it was appropriately configured. :-) > > sure, I like auto-configuring clusters too, but do you need salt-like > tools for this? the way I do it is that the pxe default boots into
No. > the discovery kernel, which in rc.local just probes MAC/IPMI/port > and hands it to the admin node, which updates the DB and switches pxe > to a normal node boot. Yup. This is one of our operational modes. Treat the hardware as code. Just don't enforce language, objects, etc. Most of that is not necessary and it gets in the way in many cases. Its very easy to fall into the trap of building huge monolithic apps to perform what are effectively simple functions. This is what anaconda, puppet, et al. do. Debugging them and maintaining them becomes a hard problem, and there become more and more constraints around what is possible, in large part, due to the implementation (and sometimes language issues). Salt and their ilk solve a set of problems. We have customers using Salt. And puppet/chef/... . Many of these are opinionated frameworks. Such frameworks are good for web development. Maybe less so for cloud/cluster setup/use. -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics, Inc. email: land...@scalableinformatics.com web : http://scalableinformatics.com http://scalableinformatics.com/siflash phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121 fax : +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
