DELL 1955 'Blade Server'
jcl...@gmail.com
cores each/8Gb RAM 2 x 73Gb SAS drives, etc. I have to choose between
SUS EL10 and RH AS 4. Anyone have any input as to which would be better
and why? I have years of Linux experience, but I have never done any
clustering of any kind.
Thanks!
Jeroen Geilman
> We are about to get a demo of the DELL Poweredge 1955. 4 Blades, 4
> cores each/8Gb RAM 2 x 73Gb SAS drives, etc. I have to choose between
> SUS EL10 and RH AS 4. Anyone have any input as to which would be better
> and why?
Depends on many factors, but off the top I would say go with Red Hat - they
have had support for this stuff for a long time.
> I have years of Linux experience, but I have never done any
> clustering of any kind.
Blade server does not automatically mean clustering - they are completely
self-contained servers, and could conceivable each run a standalone LAMP
system, or SQL server, or whatever.
They're just very space-efficient, but there are versions that come with
built-in fibrechannel - which is a better indication of clustering than
just the fact that they're blades.
If you *want* to do clustering, you need to decide whether you need load
balancing (network clustering) or application clustering, i.e. Mosix or
Beowulf.
If you need to run one application fast, Mosix will blow your mind.
There is a CD-runnable version of Knoppix that can do OpenMosix.
It's called ClusterKnoppix - give it a try.
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one application fast in this case.
So, knowing that, would one be better off running RedHat AS 4 or SUSE
EL10?
Price is not nearly as much of an issue as ease of use.
Thanks
Jeroen Geilman
> Sorry I wasn't clear. I do *want* to do clustering. I do want to run
> one application fast in this case.
>
> So, knowing that, would one be better off running RedHat AS 4 or SUSE
> EL10?
>
> Price is not nearly as much of an issue as ease of use.
>
In that case, check their respective software support - I've never used SuSE
EL so can't tell you what it can or can't do, or how it looks if it does.
The support available for application clustering should be well-documented
on each.
Henrik Carlqvist
So what kind of clustering do you want?
> I do want to run one application fast in this case.
Is that single application multithreaded? Will you be running multiple
instances of that single application? What kind of application is this?
Does it do a lot of calculations on a small amount of data or does it
handle a lot of data?
Once you have identified what kind of problem you are trying to solve you
might find a good solution. If you are running a single instance of a
single application the only use of a cluster you might get is some kind of
failover functionality.
If your application only has a few threads and is run in a single instance
you will not benefit from a cluster if it handles a lot of data. Instead
you would be better off with a single machine with many CPU cores.
> So,knowing that, would one be better off running RedHat AS 4 or SUSE
> EL10?
We still don't know enough to identify a good solution, but most likely it
will not matter much wich distribution you choose. Almost any distribution
can be configured for almost any task. The choice of the distribution
should be left to the persion(s) who are supposed to administer the
machines. They will make a choice based on personal preferences for a
favorite distribution coming previous varying experiences from different
distributions.
The users of the machines should give a list of requirements on the
installation. These requirements could be something like need to have
application X and application Y of at least version A.B and need to work
together with functionality Z in our current network infrastructure. A
system administrator with some experience knows to add some extra
requirements like need to be able to fast re-create an installation and
need routines to send out patches.
regards Henrik
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