Sysman is a Linux system management infrastructure for HPC clusters similar to the /proc file system and provides a familiar yet powerful interface for server and storage system management. In the Sysman virtual file system each managed entity (e.g., power on/off button of a server), is represented by a file. Reading from Sysman files obtains active information from devices being managed by Sysman (e.g., power state of storage systems, BladeCenter chassis temperature, CPU type and boot order information of servers). Writing to Sysman files initiates tasks such as turning on/off server blades, discovering new devices, and changing the boot order of a blade. The combination of the file access semantics and existing Unix utilities such as grep and find that operate on multiple files allow the creation of very short but powerful system management procedures for large HPC clusters. Sysman is an extendable framework and has a simple interface through which new system management procedures can be easily added.
By: Mohammad Banikazemi; David Daly; Bulent Abali
Published in: RC24273 in 2007
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