system administration toolsuite

Introduction

quattor is a system administration toolkit providing a powerful, portable and modular toolsuite for the automated installation, configuration and management of clusters and farms running UNIX derivates like Linux and Solaris. quattor was started in the scope of the EDG project (2001-2003). Development and maintenance is coordinated by CERN (IT department) in collaboration with other partner institutes (including BARC, BEGrid,  IN2P3/LAL, INFN/CNAF,  NIKHEF, Trinity College Dublin, UAM Madrid and others).

Design and Architecture

• slides on quattor architecture (ppt, pdf)

The quattor information model is based on the distinction between the desired state and the actual state. The desired state is registered in a fabric-wide Configuration Database (CDB), using a specially designed configuration language for expressing and validating configurations, composed out of reusable hierarchical building blocks called templates. Configurations are propagated to and cached on the managed nodes.

Subsystems running on the nodes take care of managing software packages and configuring local services:

• The Software Package Management Agent (SPMA) handles local software installations using the system packager (like RPM or PKG). Packages can be stored and managed centrally in Software Repositories (SWRep).

• The Node Configuration Manager (NCM) subsystem configures/reconfigures local system and grid services using a plug-in component framework.

• A subsystem called Automated Installation Infrastructure (AII) takes care of initial node installation, configuring the system installer (KickStart/Anaconda, JumpStart).

For more information about the quattor architecture, please check the links in the 'documentation' tab.

Note that Monitoring is not part of quattor, but handled by other tools eg. the ELFms monitoring system (LEMON).

Status and Availability

The quattor subsystems are available, as well as installation documentation.

The primary platform is Linux (in particular Scientific Linux/RH Linux), but platform independence is a design principle. A proof-of-concept Solaris port (done by CERN IT/PS with support from SUN Microsystems) is available (check here for details).

• Most quattor components are being used in production at the CERN computer centre (CERN IT/FIO), managing more than 4300 nodes (CPU worker nodes, tape and disk servers, infrastructure servers)

• Other sites (Trinity College, NIKHEF, IN2P3/LAL, UAM Madrid, INFN/CNAF, BEGrid) are using or deploying quattor for managing production fabrics.

Grid Systems

A community driven taskforce, the Quattor Working Group (QWG), has been set up by LCG GDB (Grid Deployment Board) to develop and maintain a common set of  templates allowing to install and configure grid middleware services with Quattor. This development is using standard Quattor infrastructure and components. It relies on Quattor advanced features to provide a service oriented management of the middleware and share much of the effort of maintaining grid middleware configuration.

See also the 'Software' and 'News' tab for updates.

last modified: 21/05/07