[Lustre-discuss] Lustre Solution Delivery

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 17:32 -0600, Sam Bigger wrote:
> 
> Chris,
> 
> Just a tip on the Lustre help scenario. Don't wait till the last
> minute to get the Lustre guy
> involved.

This is good advise.  A lot of planning and decision making needs to be
done far ahead of equipment purchase to make for a successful
deployment.

> If they can't just drop in one of the pre-built kernels (like Redhat
> ur Suse) it's going
> to take some work.

Keep in mind, for RHEL 5 and SLES 10 clients, we support "patchless"
mode in which you run lustre modules that are built for the kernel that
comes with the vendor's distribution.  No need to build kernels for
clients, and in many cases, no need to even build lustre.

For servers (OSS and MDS), they should be mostly "sealed server" (i.e.
no other software should run on it -- reducing the need for kernels
other than the Sun provided Lustre kernels) installations anyway, so the
kernels we provide should suffice.

> Some customers/demos have very specific requirements on this,

But see above re: patchless clients.  We will run on the vendor supplied
kernel for RHEL5 and SLES10.

> They also need to know the IB stack (OFED, etc)

OFED is the preferred I/B stack if possible.

> If you are using CentOS, then you may get
> by with a prebuilt redhat kernel that comes with an older version of
> OFED IB support in it.

RHEL5 (and thus CentOS 5) comes with an OFED stack included in the OS.

> But, if
> the customer requires the latest version of OFED, then you're in for
> some work. 

1.6.5 will ship with OFED 1.3's kernel-ib RPMs and Lustre all built for
it.  So, IOW, 1.6 5 will work with OFED I/B compliant hardware "out of
the box"

b.

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