Clustering options

[Justin Hopper]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 16:32, Matt Olander wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 04:42:39PM -0800, Justin Hopper wrote:
> > My term of "hardware clustering" might have been incorrect.  I'm looking
> > more for high availability, but a large pool of resources would be
> > beneficial as well.  It would be ideal to have a system where you can
> > add new blades as more resources become necessary, instead of adding
> > individual servers which each run their own OS and have their own pool
> > of resources.
> 
> hey Justin,
> 
> There's a ton of stuff to help you. A few that come to mind for fail
> over are pound, plb, and freevrrpd. They all might do something of what you
> are looking for.
> 
> For most blade setups, they typically come with some software that
> allows you to setup an image server with various server images and
> auto-deploy them to various blades. For instance, the Intel blades come
> with Veritas OpForce to control image deployment.
> 
> It's mostly for restoring from a bare-metal state though. As in, a blade
> goes down and you have a rule setup that slot3 is a webserver. So, you
> call the data-center tech and tell him to swap out the blade in slot3
> (in which you turn on a red indicator light on the front so he knows
> which one) with a fresh one, preferrably from the few extra that you had
> the foresight to purchase ;)
> 
> The system detects that a new blade is in slot3 and deploys the
> webserver image, as per your rule. If anything goes wrong, you remote
> console in via the built-in management module. That's all in a perfect
> world, of course. In reality, Veritas doesn't officially support FreeBSD
> as an operating system for their OpForce software, but I'm talking to
> them and we'll see if it goes anywhere :P

Interesting.  So most blade servers allow for each node in the cluster
to run as it's own system, for example as a webserver, right?

Is there no appliance that allows for the details of the hardware to be
hidden from the OS and instead present to the OS a unified architecture,
like it's just one machine, but with the ability to add more nodes to
expand CPU, RAM, and disk?  I guess this was my misunderstanding, as
this is what I assumed the blade systems did.  I assume it would be
incredibly tricky to manage dynamically configurable hardware in the
operating system, but I also assumed that somebody had pulled it off,
but maybe not?
-- 
Justin Hopper  <jhopper at bsdhosting.net>
UNIX Systems Engineer
BSDHosting.net
Hosting Division of Digital Oasys Inc.
http://www.bsdhosting.net