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Diskless shared-root cluster

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Rrottmann (talk | contribs) at 08:26, 10 May 2007 (Added the possibility to build diskless cluster based upon NFS instead of a SAN infrastructure.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A Diskless Shared-root Cluster is a platform for High Availability Infrastructures.

A Linux cluster filesystem, e.g. GFS or OCFS2, is the basis to form a single-system image (SSI) on filesystem level with any attached Storage Area Network (SAN).

But also a NFS server on the network may be configurated to host the generic boot image for the SSI cluster nodes.

Although such NFS based Diskless Shared-root Cluster are not recommended for productive environments, NFS still could be used to build cheap cluster infrastructures for less important tasks.

The architecture of a diskless computer cluster makes it possible to separate servers and storage array. The operating system as well as the actual reference data (userfiles, databases or websites) are stored competitively on the attached storage system in a centralized manner. Any server that acts as a cluster node can be easily exchanged by demand.

The additional abstraction layer between storage system and computing power eases the scale out of the infrastructure. Most notably the storage capacity, the computing power and the network bandwidth can be scaled independent from one another.

A similar technology can be found in the TruCluster (Tru64-UNIX) in the Unix sector.

The open-source implementation of a Diskless Shared-root Cluster is known as Open-Sharedroot.

Literature

  • Marc Grimme, Mark Hlawatschek, Thomas Merz: [1] Data sharing with a Red Hat GFS storage cluster
  • Marc Grimme, Mark Hlawatschek [2] German Whitepaper: Der Diskless Shared-root Cluster (PDF-Datei; 1,1 MB)
  • Kenneth W. Preslan: [3] Red Hat GFS 6.1 – Administrator’s Guide
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