Sysman: A virtual file system for managing clusters

Abstract

Sysman is a system management infrastructure for clusters and data centers similar to the /proc file system. It provides a familiar yet powerful interface for the management of servers, storage systems, and other devices. In the Sysman virtual file system each managed entity (e.g., power on/off button of a server, CPU utilization of a server, a LUN on a storage device), is represented by a file. Reading from Sysman files obtains active information from devices being managed by Sysman. 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 clusters. Sysman is an extensible framework and has a simple interface through which new system management procedures can be easily added. We show that by using a few lines of Linux commands system management operations can be issued to more than 2000 servers in one second and the results can be collected at a rate of more than seven servers per second. We have been using Sysman (and its earlier implementations) in a cluster of Intel and PowerPC blade servers containing hundreds of blades with various software configurations.