[Lustre-discuss] new lustre management tools

Daire Byrne Daire.Byrne at framestore.com
Mon Feb 23 04:07:48 PST 2009


Robert,

Here is some feedback from our perspective.

Our deployments are probably not big enough to care too much about 
configuration tools and we don't use any fancy networking or routers. 
Saying that, I'm all for nice ways to monitor Lustre specific metrics 
and so I suppose the config tools also serve to define your configuration 
which the monitoring tools can then use. I'd also vote for a monitoring 
webpage over a native GUI (if that is up for discussion). I remember the
old Lustre Manager webpage and wished that it had been continued!

We currently monitor our Lustre server metrics using an inhouse daemon 
(similar to Ganlia) which is then plotted using Cacti. It doesn't give 
us much in the way of instantaneous feedback but we tend to be more 
interested in trends anyway.

One thing that may or may not be useful (!) would be be a Lustre yum 
repository. Then perhaps we can get upgrades and recommended software 
versions automatically and easily. It would be great for client upgrades 
(patchless) if we had a Lustre akmod RPM package (or similar) which would 
automatically build the modules for the current kernel (like the Nvidia 
modules in rpmfusion). You could even go the whole way and create a 
Lustre distro based on CentOS and provide a CD for download (e.g. 
AsteriskNow). I appreciate this may not be of any use at all to the big 
labs but if you want wider adoption of Lustre then it might be useful.

> It has come to our attention that Lustre is occasionally found to be 
> difficult to configure and manage. To address this, we are exploring 
> options for improving our configuration tools for Lustre, including  
> replacing lustre_config completely.  However, we want to engage our  
> user community as much as possible in this effort, since that help  
> ensure the tools we end up with will be a good fit for those who use 
> it the most.  For instance, the new tool "Shine" (CEA's rewrite of  
> Bull's admin tools) looks very promising and I encourage everyone  
> interested in this to check it out: http://shine-wiki.async.eu/wiki/ 
> Home.  Does anyone know of other tools or efforts underway to build  
> one?   Ideally, I'd like to concentrate efforts on one solution, and 
> declare this to be the "official" tool.
> 
> On related note, what do people use to monitor Lustre?  Of course  
> there is LMT (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lmt/), and I've heard  
> reports of others using nagios and/or ganglia, as well. Anything else?

We looked at LMT but it was a bit of a pain to configure tbh. It obviously
was designed specifically for LLNL's environment and relied on many things
that we simply don't use.

Hopefully some of this is useful!

Daire



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