DRBL and Clonezilla

[Oneslowz28]

Any pics yet Terry?

[Airbozo]

Any pics yet Terry?

Just brought in my camera to take pics before shipping.

I had a few issues, the main one being that once the cloned systems rebooted, they came up in the recovery mode. I just canceled out of that and the systems rebooted fine.

I had a couple of other issues, one with IP addresses. I had to add a static IP to all 120 systems... I also had to point all of the systems to the manager node as their time server. This is where I am lacking the proper windows admin skills. I know someone familiar with the powershell could have written a quick script to automate both tasks.

More info after I suss some coffee...

[Oneslowz28]

Good deal! I got the coffee flowing here this morning too. Already 3 cups in.

[Airbozo]

Forgot to post a few shots of the blades in action.

All 6 chassis running multicast tests;

A single chassis showing 10 blades with 2 nodes each;

Each chassis has 10 blades and 2 1/10gb switch. Each blade is 2 complete nodes. Each node has 2 processors (E5640's) and 4x 2 gb Dimms, and one 300gb 2.5" hdd for a total of 120 processors and 240 2gb Dimms. Each node operates independently (not in cluster setup) running Windows server 2008 R2. What you cant see in these pictures is the manager node which collects data from each node and monitors the status of each node (health status). The manager node is a 1U system with 2 processors and 4x 2gb Dimms (basically the same specs as one node of each blade). There is also a windows XP test box running VLC streaming an HD video loop via multicast.

Notice all the power cords? I had to shut down several of our SGI and SUN supercomputers to power up and run the tests. In the short rack to the left in the first picture is my Clonezilla server (running Fedora 10) and 2 other test systems (one running RHEL 5.4 and one running Server 2008 R2).

[x88x]

Mmmm, yummy. That is an incredibly dense amalgamation of computing power.

[Airbozo]

Mmmm, yummy. That is an incredibly dense amalgamation of computing power.

I wish I had it here longer to play with. It is now at the customers site being setup for a demo...
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[billygoat333]

mmm that is sexxxy!! lol. servers seem so complicated to me. *runs to read more*

speaking of clonezilla... is it a pain to ghost a drive to another using that program? I created a backup with it once, but haven't used it to copy to another hdd. seems like its fairly simple, I just haven't done it.

[x88x]

To copy an image to a drive, the process is just as easy as making the image in the first place. Just read the instructions and you should be fine.

[Airbozo]

mmm that is sexxxy!! lol. servers seem so complicated to me. *runs to read more*

speaking of clonezilla... is it a pain to ghost a drive to another using that program? I created a backup with it once, but haven't used it to copy to another hdd. seems like its fairly simple, I just haven't done it.

To copy an image to a drive, the process is just as easy as making the image in the first place. Just read the instructions and you should be fine.

Correct.

Clonezilla is really easy to use for creating images and restoring. It even works with Windows 7.

[billygoat333]

thanks all... I will report back tomorrow when my 2tb drive gets here so I can migrate my OS onto my 750gb drive