Jason, I've used the bittorrent transport to install 100 nodes of a cluster that we've in production (in CINECA) and results were great, both in terms of performance and reliability.
In terms of performance I was able to install all the 100 nodes (with a RHEL4 of 2GB) in 4min!!! The nodes are IBM blades LS21 with 2 dual-core AMD processors (4 cores/node) 2.4GHz and a Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5706S Gigabit network card. I repeated the test also using 50 and 15 nodes. In all the cases I always installed all the nodes in 4min. So for these numbers we've a perfect scalability. I hope to be able to repeat the tests using also more than 100 clients at the same time... With rsync I needed 13mins to install 50 clients. With more than 50 clients my image server is in pain, it starts to swap and some clients fail the installation. With more than 50 clients at the same time rsync becomes unusable. Also using multicast the scalability (obviously) is perfect, but the overhead of udpcast is quite big and to install 50 clients I needed 16mins (in particular - I suppose - this is due to the transmission of the redundant data, in order to reduce the probability to loose a packet). So, also in terms of reliability bittorrent seems to be the best choice for massive installations. Anyway, I've all the logs and I got some statistics from my tests (also regarding the badnwidth usage on the clients). We're writing an article with other systemimager/oscar developers, so I hope the detailed results of the experiments, with some graphics, etc, etc. will be available ASAP... Regarding your problem it seems that you've not a bittorrent client installed on your image server. Theoretically all the standard bittorrent clients included in all the distros are supported, for my tests I'm using BitTorrent-4.4.0 (or BitTorrent-4.2.0-1 in RHEL4). If there is not a client included in your distro you can download the package from here: http://download.bittorrent.com/dl/?M=D Regards, -Andrea Jason Knudsen wrote: > Morning everyone, > > I'm interested in any advice / information that anyone has gathered > while using the Bittorrent method for image deployment? Does the speed > of the image transfer significantly increase if using X amount of seeds > etc...? Has anybody done the numbers? > > I'm thinking of trying it out, however the documentation is a bit vague > at http://wiki.sisuite.org/SystemImager/BitTorrent > > I'm not entirely too certain how I make my server into a SEED? While > starting the service I get this error: > > Starting SystemImager's BitTorrent Transport: > systemimager-server-bittorrent... failed. > Cannot find a valid tracker binary. > > Any information on the subject would be appreciated, > > Jason > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Sisuite-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
