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Cluster Administration

 

Management Node

A management node can be used to access the consoles of all of the cluster nodes and to monitor their status.� This is particularly useful (even necessary) in the event that a node loses network connectivity or if a node stops responding altogether.

Types of Storage in Clustering

                  There are main three types of Storage Solutions while Clustering your architecture.

Cluster Interconnects

                    The network fabric connecting the compute nodes in a cluster to carry inter-node message traffic is referred to as cluster interconnect or simply interconnect. The term System Area Network(SAN) is also sometimes used to denote a cluster interconnect. Although the scope of SANs is somewhat broader than cluster interconnects. Note that an interconnect does not hook up to the user LAN. It is completely under the administrative domain of the cluster administrator. The LAN administrator need not be even aware of the type of interconnect being used in a cluster, unless of course the same person is playing both roles. The user connectivity of the cluster is simply through a LAN connection on the head node of the cluster and does not require much design consideration.

General Cluster Nodes

 

Overview

This chapter contains an expansion of the definitions presented in the first chapter, and lays groundwork for the following sections.

Introduction to Clusters

                 "Cluster" is an ambiguous term in computer industry. Depending on the vendor and specific contexts, a cluster may refer to wide a variety of environments. In general a cluster refers to a set of computer systems connected together. For the purposes of this book a cluster is set of computers which are connected to each other, and are physically located close to each other, in order to solve problems more efficiently. These types of clusters are also referred to as High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, or simply Compute clusters.