Interacting with a group of servers in real-time with MCollective
*Excerpt
Today we have tools like cfengine, puppet, and chef to help automate server deployment, configuration, and maintenance. However, its been difficult to interact with those same servers in real-time. MCollective is a framework which allows you to interact with small to very large clusters of servers in real-time. This session will cover its features, common uses, and extending its functionality.
Description
While configuration management gives us the ability to define and configure a large set of servers easily, its often hard to interact with them in real time. Also consider the fact that many of the current cloud platforms means the locations and IPs of your machines change quite often. MCollective tries to solve these problems and much more by providing a framework to overcome these limits.
You can almost think of MCollective as a command line extension to your configuration management tool. You can create tools that allow you to think of your infrastructure as a whole unit instead of individual servers. It can be used as for reporting, parallel job execution (i.e. reload apache on all servers matching a condition), collective middleware maintenance, and many other tasks.
I’ll cover the following topics in the session:
- Design and Features
- Installation
- Common tasks
- Advanced use cases
- Extending functionality
Tags
linux, cloud computing, operations, operating systems
Speaking experience
Speaker
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Lance Albertson
OSU Open Source Lab- Website: http://www.lancealbertson.com/
- Blog: http://www.lancealbertson.com/
- Twitter: ramereth
- Identi.ca: ramereth
- Favorites: View Lance's favorites
Biography
Lance is the Lead Systems Administrator/Architect for the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) and a Gentoo Linux Developer. He joined the Gentoo Linux project in 2003 and have been involved in managing their infrastructure and maintaining about a dozen or so packages in portage. Lance manages all of the hosting activities that the OSL provides for the open source community including projects such as Kernel.org, Drupal, Apache Software Foundation, and many many more. Lance has been at the OSL since 2007.
Previously Lance was a UNIX Administrator for the Enterprise Server Technologies group at Kansas State University helping maintain campus email along with other various tasks. Previous to that, he worked with his dad near Hiawatha, Kansas on the family farm growing corn and soybeans.
In his free time he helps organize the Corvallis Beer and Blog and plays trumpet in a local jazz group The Infallible Collective. He holds a B.A. in Agriculture Technology Management from Kansas State University, where he minored in Agronomy and Computer Science.
Sessions
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- Title: Creating a low-cost clustered virtualization environment using Ganeti
- Track: Chemistry
- Room: Fremont
- Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
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Excerpt:
Creating a redundant yet scalable virtualization environment is often difficult and expensive. Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment while enabling you to use low cost hardware. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.
- Speakers: Lance Albertson