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A set of discrete virtual machine appliances to run and monitor research compute environments.
##What is Symphony? The Alces Software Symphony deployment framework is a set of tools and conventions wrapped into a set of discrete virtual machine designed to deploy, manage and monitor both HPC and Cloud research compute environments.
##Who is Symphony for? Symphony is designed to deploy, manage and monitor research compute environments - it is designed for administrators to deploy persistent research compute environments either in the Cloud or on baremetal.
##Why should I use Symphony? The Symphony deployment framework is based upon years of experience and expertise deploying, managing and monitoring both HPC and Cloud clusters - the tools and applications provided include well-known working, secure configurations.
The Symphony set of virtual machine appliances reduce the time to research by simplifying cluster deployment and setup.
##Symphony architecture
###Symphony-director (software deployment) Based on open-source tools Cobbler and Puppet, the deployment appliance is configured to provision each compute node in the environment. Cobbler allows comprehensive kickstart and DHCP server management, and is capable of deploying a wide range of Linux distributions. Node customization is performed via Puppet, providing an always-up-to-date software configuration management database for all servers in the environment.
Read more about each of the key components in the symphony-director appliance:
###Symphony-repo (repository management) Based on the open-source Pulp tool, the repository management appliance provides advanced software package management, including local caching, automatic update collection and distribution, and customized repository creation. Pulp has recently been selected by RedHat as the core of their Enterprise Satellite software management product.
Read more about each of the key components in the symphony-repo appliance:
###Symphony-monitor (performance and availability monitoring) Performing both out-of-band and OS-level monitoring, this appliance provides administrators with real-time performance data via the popular Ganglia software suite, and availability and alerting capabilities via Nagios software.
Read more about each of the key components in the symphony-monitor appliance:
###Symphony-directory (user authentication, DNS) Implemented using FreeIPA, the directory appliance provides robust name services and user credential management for the cluster. Available with both a graphical web interface and a set of comprehensive command-line tools, IPA implements a secure Kerberos network to manage user accounts, groups and authorization levels. Capable of being integrated with existing LDAP and active-directory environments.
Read more about each of the key components in the symphony-directory appliance:
###Symphony-app (clusterware, gridware) Home to the cluster application repository using both Alces Clusterware and Gridware tools; providing cluster and application management tools to the environment.
Read more about each of the key components in the symphony-app appliance:
##System administrator guides
- Initial hardware/software setup
- Software deployment and configuration
##User/administrator guides