Kadeploy3: Efficient and Scalable Operating System Provisioning for Clusters

International audienceInstalling an operating system can be very tedious when it must be repro- duced on several computers, for instance, on large scale clusters. Since it is not realistic to install the nodes independently, disk cloning or imaging with tools such as Clonezilla[1], Rocks [5], SystemImager [6] or xCAT [8] is a com- mon approach. In that case the administrator must keep updated only one node (sometimes called golden node), that will be replicated to other nodes. This article presents Kadeploy3, a tool designed to perform operating system provi- sioning using disk imaging and cloning. Thanks to its e ciency, scalability, and reliability, it is particularly suited for large scale clusters