[Beowulf] RedHat Satellite Server as a cluster management tool.

[Tim Mattox]

Hello Michael,
I'm one of the co-developers of Warewulf.
(http://warewulf-cluster.org/)
We try to make it as sysadmin friendly as we can.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the README
file inside the RPM (it gets put in /usr/share/doc/warewulf...)
It explains the philosophy behind Warewulf's development.

If you have any questions about Warewulf, feel free
to post to it's mailing list.  I also follow the Beowulf
mailing list, but not daily.  I admit Warewulf's
documentation can be lacking (or there, but
talking about a previous version), but once you
get into it a bit, the system makes quite a lot of
sense... mostly ;-)

For your specific task you describe, I would think
Warewulf would work well for you.  It's not perfect,
but we eat our own dogfood, and this is the best
tasting "dogfood" I've used for cluster management. ;-)

Managing a cluster with Warewulf is kind of like
sysadmining less than two machines... the boot server,
and then a "virtual node"... which is just a chroot
on the boot server.  If your cluster is heterogeneous,
you can set up more than one VNFS (virtual node
file system).

And I can't pass up commenting about the costs
for "per node" software...  I grimace at anything
where the cost of the software has ANY non-zero
multiple related to the number of nodes.  Why?
The hardware costs in the cluster's I've helped build
tend to be far under $1k per node, and usually
under $500 per node.  RHN is just not an option
for that kind of cluster.

Anyway, good luck choosing a cluster management
tool for your setup.  The ones rgb mentioned are
all worth considering.
--
Tim Mattox - tmattox at gmail.com - http://homepage.mac.com/tmattox/