FacilitiesMeetingConfigVM

View the Indico agenda here: https://indico.cern.ch/event/vmcfg11.

Background

• Virtual machine management strategies and experience gained from US ATLAS sites and elsewhere to date
• Consolidation of head node services into virtual machines
• Looking forward for configuration management approaches

Possible topics:

• KVM, VMware, etc experiences in the Facility
• Node and image provisioning with Cobbler, Rocks, etc
• CernVM appliances
• Configuration management with Puppet templates, Rocks, ...
• Best practices with rpm and yum, repos
• Head node service candidates: job schedulers, cluster monitoring, OSG grid services (eg. GUMS), storage services and databases
• Benchmark case studies
• Redundancy and failover
• SL6 and KSM, http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KSM - what can be tested with SL6 in advance of workshop? Memory footprint reduction.
• KVM virtualization management tools: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools
  • Which are best-of-breed?
  • Use case could be a high-availability server for critical services, such as condor master
  • demo with failover to second host
• SANs for vm management

The meeting would be organized as one kick-off day of presentations and discussion followed by a second day of informal discussions of technical issues among participants.

Questions to guide discussions

Representatives from each site: please prepare a few slides addressing the following

1. How are nodes built? Distinguish: worker nodes, head nodes, storage nodes, use of templates, as needed. Which "cluster services" are used (dhcp, dns, ..etc) and network configurations (use of VLANs, NAT, etc)
2. How is configuration managed post-install?
3. Describe update methods, eg., use of yum repos (which?)
4. Describe virtualization frameworks in use, and which services are running in vm's.
5. Describe any virtual cluster management frameworks in use (if any) and/or how are virtual machines administered at your site: instance creation, stop/start, migration and/or failover, etc.
6. Describe any benchmarks studies of vm's

Agenda

• First day - presentations from admins and other experts and discussion
• Second day - informal technical discussions

Logistics

• Rooms: TBD
• Visiting Brookhaven Lab (thanks to Hiro for providing these links):
  • BNL's gate access: https://www.bnl.gov/gateaccess/
  • On site housing, http://www.bnl.gov/staffservices/OnsiteHousing/default.asp
  • Nearby hotels:
    • http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/ispsh-springhill-suites-long-island-brookhaven/
    • http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/ispmf-fairfield-inn-medford-long-island/
    • http://www.comfortinn.com/hotel-medford-new_york-NY234?promo=gglocal
    • http://www.hamptoninnbrookhaven.com/ - Ask for Brookhaven National Laboratory Corporate Rate - $114
    • http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/cp/1/en/hotel/ispcp?&externalHotelDetailHit=true
    • http://www.marriott.com/setSCtracking.mi?scid=20100202T155101000001&mid=http://www.marriott.com/ISPHV
• Doodle poll for attendance http://doodle.com/rceesnq5ghg2byy8

References

-- RobertGardner - 17 May 2011