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Also read these pages and this page will make more sense: Warewulf Stateless, Warewulf Statefull.

For some time now I have been looking for a provisioning tool. I've tried along the way …

• Project Kusu, now defunct, but a great, simple template driven system. No fancy gui.
• HP's CMU, also a great tool, golden image approach. The nice feature of CMU is that master node can delegate hundreds of node to be image by a designated compute node relieving the master node.
• Bright Computing, a very complex tool that takes over every config file imaginable. Simple tasks become very burdensome, never achived traction with this too.
• xCAT, the behemoth of open source provisioning tools. It does it all, which means a huge learning curve.
• http://warewulf.lbl.gov/trac Warewulf. I settled on this for the reasons that is simple and written in a language that's readable (Perl).

The requirements of the provisioning tool were two fold:

• My HPCC is flooded with small jobs that run for weeks to months (no wall time) but have small memory requirements (< 1GB). Thus I want to design stateless compute nodes and frequently tailor the setup to the scientific needs (non graphical).
• The HPCC also encounters very large jobs (for us that is 16-32 cores with memory requirements in the 256 GB range) utilizing X11, OpenGL, Nvidia and other large complex analyses software. In this case one compute node is build up to satisfaction, then we grab a “golden image” and deploy.

So I settled on WareWulf which does these two approaches and sports an active forum for questions.

wwsh node new b6 --netdev=eth0 \
--hwaddr=00:00:00:00:00:00 --ipaddr=192.168.1.12 \
--netmask=255.255.0.0  --network=255.255.0.0
--groups=wwnodes

wwsh node set b6 --netdev=eth1 \
--hwaddr=00:00:00:00:00:00 --ipaddr=10.10.100.12 \
--netmask=255.255.0.0  --network=255.255.0.0

wwsh provision set b6 --fileadd passwd,shadow,group
wwsh provision set b6 --fileadd hosts,bashrc,profile
wwsh provision set b6 --fileadd network.ww,ifcfg-eth1.ww

SOURCEADDR=b0 wwmkchroot golden-system /var/chroots/goldimages/b0.chroot 

wwsh object modify -s bootloader=sda b6
wwsh object modify -s diskformat=sda1,sda3 b6
wwsh object modify -s filesystems="mountpoint=/boot:dev=sda1:type=ext4:size=500,dev=sda3:type=swap:size=2048,mountpoint=/:dev=sda7:type=ext4:size=70000" b6

wwvnfs --chroot=/var/chroots/goldimages/b0.chroot 
wwsh provision set b6 --vnfs=b0.chroot

wwsh pxe update
wwsh dhcp update
service dhcpd restart

wwsh object print b6 -p :all
wwsh provision list

PXE boot node, then turn provisioning off (or on UNDEF)
wwsh provision set --bootlocal=EXIT b6

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