Chapter 10. Management Software
Now that you have a cluster, you are
going to want to keep it running, which will involve a number of
routine system administration tasks. If you have done system
administration before, then for the most part you
won't be doing anything new. The administrative
tasks you'll face are largely the same tasks you
would face with any multiuser system. It is just that these tasks
will be multiplied by the number of machines in your cluster. While
creating 25 new accounts on a server may not sound too hard, when you
have to duplicate those accounts on each node in a 200-node cluster,
you'll probably want some help.
For a small cluster with only a few users, you may be able to get by
doing things the way you are used to doing them. But why bother? The
tools in this chapter are easy to install and use. Mastering them,
which won't take long, will lighten your workload.
While there are a number of tools available, two representative tools
(or tool sets) are described in this chapter-the
Cluster Command and Control (C3) tools set and
Ganglia. C3 is a set of utilities that can be
used to automate a number of tasks across a cluster or multiple
clusters, such as executing the same command on every machine or
distributing files to every machine. Ganglia is used to monitor the
health of your cluster from a single node using a web-based
interface.
|