Lustre Monitoring

I have had several Lustre deployments recently that included performance monitoring, here are the common tools folks use for monitoring their Lustre environments. As time allows I will get a HOWTO posted for each on installing and configuring them.

• collectl
• Lustre Monitoring Tool

Automated OS Provisioning

Automated operating system (OS) provisioning is an important part of any IT department. It allows staff to rapidly build new servers or virtual machines that are identical to all others currently in use. This lack of variation allows for easy tracking of necessary upgrades, and minimizes the number of combinations of software and hardware that must be tested before deploying updates and patches. This commonality across systems also allows system administrators to work on new systems with very little ramp-up time to understand how one system may be different from all the others.

I have been working in several large, heterogeneous environments recently that required the ability to build common OS images, across a variety of OSs and platforms. Here are the common utilities for the different OSs to use when deploying OS images, in one nice clean list:

Solaris
Jumpstart

HP-UX
Ignite-UX

Linux (SLES)
AutoYAST

Linux (Fedora/RHEL/CentOS)
Kickstart
Cobbler

Linux (Ubuntu)
Kickstart
preseed

AIX
Network Installation Manager (NIM)

Windows (Server 2003)
Unattended

Windows (Server 2008)
Automated Installation Kit (AIK)

Windows (XP)
Unattended

Windows (Vista)
Automated Installation Kit (AIK)

Multi-OS Support
Altiris