This is the Kadeploy3 readme file. Most of this file's content come from this publication: http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/71/06/38/PDF/RR-8002.pdf
More informations available here: http://kadeploy3.gforge.inria.fr/
Kadeploy is a scalable, efficient and reliable deployment system (cluster provisioning solution) for cluster and grid computing. It provides a set of tools for cloning, configuring (post installation) and managing cluster nodes. It can deploy a 300-nodes cluster in a few minutes, without intervention from the system administrator. It can deploy Linux, *BSD, Windows, Solaris.
It plays a key role on the Grid'5000 testbed, where it allows users to reconfigure the software environment on the nodes.
This is how Kadeploy works: (1) Minimal environment setup The nodes reboot into a trusted minimal environment that contains all the tools required for the deployment (partitioning tools, archive management,...) and the required partitioning is performed. (2) Environment installation The environment is broadcast to all the nodes and extracted on the disks. Some post-installations operations can also be performed. (3) Reboot on the deployed environment
Kadeploy3 takes as input an archive containing the operating system to deploy, called an environment, and copies it on the target nodes. As a consequence, Kadeploy3 does not install an operating system following a classical installation procedure and the user has to provide an archive of the operating system's filesystem (as a tarball, for Linux environments).
This is how Kadeploy controls the boot process of the nodes in order to be able to perform it's installation task: (1) Kadeploy writes PXE profiles on a TFTP or HTTP server (2) Kadeploy triggers the reboot of compute nodes using SSH, IPMI or a manageable PDU (3) Nodes get their configuration using DHCP (4) Nodes retrieve their PXE profile using TFTP (5) Nodes boot on the specified system (which can either be located on the node's hard disk or on the network)
Kadeploy3 is packaged with a set of complementary tools that are briefly described in this section.
The Kaenv tool enables users and administrators to manage a catalog of deployment images, either shared between users or private to one user.
Karights is used to define deployment permissions for users. It also provides the glue to integrate Kadeploy with a batch scheduler, making it possible to allow a given user to deploy a set of nodes for the duration of his job on the cluster.
Deployment statistics (durations, success/failures) are collected continuously, and available through the Kastat tool. This data can be leveraged by system administrators to identify nodes with hardware issues.
Tools such as Kareboot, Kaconsole and Kapower act as frontends to lower-level tools, such as those based on IPMI, and integrate with the Kadeploy rights management system, to allow users to reboot, power-off/on, and access the remote serial console of nodes.
Required services:
Copyright 2008-2013 INRIA, Kadeploy Developers kadeploy-devel@lists.gforge.inria.fr
Kadeploy3 is developed at INRIA Nancy - Grand Est. Its development is currently supported by the ADT Kadeploy project (2011-2013), which is led by the AlGorille team at LORIA.
Current developers are Luc Sarzyniec (Inria, main developer since 2011), Emmanuel Jeanvoine (Inria, design & main developer from 2008 to 2011) and Lucas Nussbaum (Univ. de Lorraine, design since 2011).