[HECnet] "Mixed" clustering

[Kari Uusim ki]

It is fully possible to run VAX (V7.3), Alpha (V8.3) and Itanium (V8.3) in the same cluster. It is not supported, but it works.





Zane H. Healy wrote:
I haven't run a cluster in close to a decade, but when I was, I had a
combination of 10Mbit and 100Mbit NIC's.   I think it is safe to assume that
the heaviest traffic you'll see for your use is access to drives on another
cluster.
What architectures are you planning to cluster.   I gather you want an
Itanium system in there.   If so I don't believe you can have a VAX in your
cluster.   I don't know if you can do VAX/Alpha/Itanium, but I do know it
isn't supported.
Zane
On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Yeah, you guys are right - mind you, the FDDI stuff would've been sort of fun to play with, maybe later.

How much bandwidth can I expect a cluster to use (I know this depends on the use of it of course, but assuming a fairly light load, no crazy 2000 user apps and DB)? Is a 100 mbps NIC enough?

Sampsa


On 29 Sep 2009, at 20:50, Kari Uusim  ki wrote:


Why don't you leave TCP/IP as it is now?
You don't have to dedicate the Ethernet just to cluster traffic (that is a feature of those inferior creations which some people call [*nix] clusters - even if they aren't). You can run any traffic on the same Ethernet interface as cluster traffic. You just have to remember if you connect the machines with a Ethernet switch that there mustn't be protocol or MAC filtering which interferes with the cluster traffic.

DECnet routing has nothing to do with TCP/IP routing. They are completely separate protocols and live their own life in a VMS machine.

I suggest you run everything on the Ethernet and forget about the FDDI.


Kari





Sampsa Laine wrote:
I've come up with an alternative solution:
I'll use ethernet for the cluster interconnect as I have ethernet ports on all the machines.
However, this leaves CHIMPY without an ethernet-based TCP/IP connection. So my question is this:
Can I hook up two machines (running VMS) with FDDI and have the second machine route packets onto the ethernet segment for me? This wasn't immediately clear from the documentation. I assume if the second machine is set up as a L1 router DECNET over this setup will be possible?
Sampsa
On 29 Sep 2009, at 19:50, Kari Uusim  ki wrote:
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Is it possible to run a cluster over both ethernet and FDDI?
Basically, I'd like to connect Machine A -> B using ethernet and B -> C using FDDI - is this possible?
Sampsa
.

Unfortunately that configuration violates the rule of full connectivity. All cluster members must have direct connectivity to other members.

But if you add a FDDI-Ethernet-bridge, you should get a "legal" configuration.


Kari




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