Hearns, John wrote:
I like the shared socket approach. Building a separate IPMI network
seems a lot of extra wiring to me. Admittedly the IPMI switches can be
configured to be dirt cheap but it still feels like building a extra
tiny road for one car a day when a huge highway with spare capacity
exists right next door carrying thousands of cars. (Ok, cheesy
analogy!)
Errrr.... you missed all my Beowulf posts about the clashes with the
IPMI ports
and the ports used for 'rsh' connections on a cluster then? And all the
shenanigans
with setting sunrpc.min_resvport etc.?
Having a separate, simple IPMI network which comes up when you power the
racks up
has a lot of advantages. 10/100 Netgear switches cost almost nothing,
and getting
another loom of Cat5 cables configured when the racks are being built is
relatively easy.
By the way, which hardware do you use?
We've been down both paths. On our recent acquisition, we ended up with
separate, dedicated IPMI ports, despite our spec stating we wanted
shared socked ports. I bought 4 Netgear switches and added
infrastructure cabling. Having been down both paths, now, in the last
year (nothing is too old to have the memory clear in my mind) I
definitely have decided the completely separate IPMI network plan is
superior overall. I wish I could retrofit the Dell cluster to
accomplish this, but it ain't gonna happen.
It's a much cleaner (from a cluster management view) approach, IMNSHO.
gerry
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