Originally posted by: bill, Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:29 pm

Hi All,

Platform OCS 5 is in progress here at Platform and it is a completely new product - I can even honestly say that parts of it are pretty 'revolutionary'

Platform OCS 5 is written from the ground up with a new Cluster provisioning framework called 'Kusu' http://www.osgdc.org

With Kusu as the core of Platform OCS we are able to provide you with really cool features such as:

1) Packaged based provisioning (pretty ordinary stuff)
2) Diskless provisioning (new and really cool)
3) Imaged provisioning (install an image onto the disk and run)
4) Repository management including:
- Multiple repositories - like fedora, RH, CentOS
- Patching repositories 'yum' and 'up2date'
- Repository snapshots so you can update and roll-back if it screws up.
5) OCS Kits - kits are pre-packaged applications and tools that are configured to install and run in a OCS environment out of the box.
6) Node Groups - Node Groups are 'Node Templates' - they define exactly what a group of nodes will do. Node groups define the following:
- Node Naming sequence
- Repository the nodes will use
- The kernel parameters for the nodes
- The networking for the nodes
- The partitioning for the nodes
- The 'packages' that will be installed.
- The drivers and modules that will be loaded
7) Node groups provide 'dynamic provisioning' you can re-provision nodes to do whatever you want in seconds.

8) Automatic updates to nodes in a node group. When packages are added or removed from a node group the nodes are updated 'on the fly' - the corresponding packages are added or removed from the nodes *without the need to reboot* or *re-install*

9) Automatic updates to nodes in diskless node groups - really this is just an extension of the automatic update but it is so cool that I just had to mention it on its own. Platform OCS 5 can add or remove packages (essentially rpms or files) to a diskless cluster on the fly - i.e. the node is running diskless and you can update it with new packages.

10) Kit - components. A Platform OCS Kit is really made up of components. We did this so that each kit can have components for different types of nodes. The most common example is a component for installer nodes and a component for compute nodes. with this mechanism a single Kit can contain components which are selectively installed on node groups when needed - pretty powerful and flexible.

11) Cluster wide file syncronization - Platform OCS 5 contains a tool called CFM (Cluster File Manager), this tool automatically syncs files between the cluster installer node and other nodes in the cluster or it can also syncronize a set of files for a node group. For example,

If you change the root password on the installer node, all you have to do is run:

cfmsync -f

to syncronize the password and shadow files to all nodes managed by the installer node

CFM automatically syncronizes files such as shadow and password but it can be configured to synchronize any file.

There is more but that will be for a later post....