[Go-essp-tech] Feedback for the 20 Oct telecon from ANUSF

[Ahmed El Zein]

Dear All,

Thanks to Dean for organising an audio recording of the conference
call.  We found it incredibly useful to get the delayed broadcast
given the meeting time wasn't able to work for us.

Joseph and I have a few comments arising from the discussion,
especially to clarify what we did at the NCI National Facility and
that may be useful to others.

o Virtualization
We are aiming to deploy our ESG node and gateway in a VM.  Our target
VM platform is VMWare ESX.  For this, we have created a JeOS[1] VM
that, details of which are here:
https://gonzo.anu.edu.au/esg-stuff/JeOS_Centos.html

o ESG node Status
Our ESG data node is up and running and we have been able (with the
help of Bob and Gavin) to test publishing.  Instructions for creating
an ESG node from the JeOS VM can be found at
https://gonzo.anu.edu.au/esg-stuff/ESGNodeSetup.html

We are currently using yum as much as possible with this
installation. For example, we are currently working on creating an RPM
for CDAT and move a lot of the configuration logic into RPMs.

o Myproxy client
We install myproxy from the VDT RPMs (much better than compiling from
scratch). Details can be found at the end of the ESG installation
document listed above.

o GridFTP
There was some discussion about installing GridFTP. We would suggest
that installing from the VDT RPMs would be the easiest way to go.

We should also mention that we are not planning to install a gridFTP
server in the data node as we intend to perform third-party
transfers with our existing production GridFTP setup.

o Xen + NFS
In the (distant) past when we were working with Xen, we tried mounting
NFS filesystems within Xen VMs and got very poor performance. This
arises as all network I/O performed within a Xen DomU is sent via a cyclical
buffer to the Dom0, which has native access to network devices, and
carries out the transfer instead of the DomU.  To address this we used
Xen's pciback option to dedicate an IRQ on the ethernet/fibre
channel/infiniband card (on your Xen box) to the DomU which runs the esg
data node stack.

Ahmed, Joseph, Ben
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_enough_operating_system