Integrating hardware management with cluster administration toolkits

Cluster administration toolkits simplify the deployment and management of large commodity clusters by incorporating scalable installers with management and cataloguing interfaces. Although these toolkits facilitate operating system level cluster administration, they typically lack tightly integrated frameworks for hardware management. Administrators who wish to leverage the standards based hardware management capabilities commonly available in commodity clusters are left to their own devices. Most opt to write their own integration scripts which can be a costly and inefficient process. This paper presents a case study for resolving this problem by integrating standards based hardware management utilities into a typical open source deployment and administration framework.