Disk Partitioning with ClusterWare

Master Node

On the master node of a Scyld cluster, the disk partitioning administration is identical to that on any stand-alone Linux server. As part of installing Red Hat Linux, you are requested to select how you would like to partition the master node's hard disk. After installation, the disk partitioning can be modified, checked, and utilized via traditional Linux tools such as fdisk, sfdisk, cfdisk, mount, etc.

Compute Nodes

The compute nodes of a Scyld cluster are slightly different from a traditional, stand-alone Linux server. Each compute node hard disk needs to be formatted and partitioned to be useful to the applications running on the cluster. However, not too many people would enjoy partitioning 64 or more nodes manually.

To simplify this task, Scyld ClusterWare provides the beofdisk tool, which allows remote partitioning of the compute node hard disks. It is very similar in operation to fdisk, but allows many nodes to be partitioned at once. The use of beofdisk for compute node partitioning is covered in more detail in the section on Partitioning Scenarios later in this chapter.