Partition Repositories for Partition Cloning - OS Independent Software Maintenance in Large Clusters of PCs

As a novel approach to software maintenance in large clusters of PCs requiring multiple OS installations we implemented partition cloning and partition repositories as well as a set of OS independent tools for software maintenance using entire partitions, thus providing a clean abstraction of all operating system configuration state. We identify the evolution of software installations (different releases) and the customization of installed systems (different machines) as two orthogonal axes. Using this analysis we devise partition repositories as an efficient, incremental storage scheme to maintain all necessary partition images for versatile, large clusters of PCs. We evaluate our approach with a release history of sample images used in the Patagonia multi-purpose clusters at ETH Z¨urich including several Linux, Windows NT and Oberon images. The study includes quantitative data that shows the viability of the OS independent approach of working with entire partitions and investigat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Felix Rauch, Christian Kurmann, Thomas Stricker
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2000, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Entire Partitions, Large Clusters, Partition Repositories