Poweredge 2650 – Stephen Hill Photography

Well there you go, one of my life goal complete, clustering. I got a hold of two Dell 2650 and wanted to build a nice little cluster for dynamips so I can start testing / practising for my CCNP. I decided to go with OpenSSI, and Debian, because that’s all people have been talking about. Took me awhile to find the correct documentation for Debian Lenny, but once I did it was smooth sailing. The doco’s can be found here .

Once it’s installed it works pretty nicely, you set processes load balance using the cryptic command “loadlevel”, when processors start to use more CPU that get moved to CPU’s.

OpenSSI is very smooth to use with automatic setup of PXE booting and etherboot. Installed GNS3 and processes started to move over to the second server. I did have to set the max memory setting in GNS3 to the size of one IOS RAM requirements so it would spawn multiple dynamips hypervisors.