Is there interest in a talk on clustering?

[Madison Kelly]

colin davidson wrote:
> I'd be interested. Also, if there is too much for a single
> presentation, could it be broken down into several.
> 
> For instance:
> 
> - An introduction to clustering, what it's good for and how to set up
> a basic cluster.
> - Virtualization, KVM, XEN (and others) pros, and gotchas.
> - Virtual Machines on clusters, starting, stopping, migrating etc.
> 
> and so on...
> 
> Cheers, Colin

I thought about that, but I'd be worried about a) dominating the talk 
schedule and b) the ungodly amount of work it would take to do each. 
Anywho, I'm thinking of a specific build that would incorporate most of 
your list... I've also been thinking about doing a follow up "seminar" 
type deal similar to what I suggested earlier.

If I do the talk, and it's looking like there is enough interest, then I 
may do a Saturday/Weekend thing anyway where I can talk the time and 
those with enough interest and actually work through a build of an 
actual cluster. The only real trick to that is coming up with the money 
for enough proper hardware to use... Something I want to do anyway, so 
it's more a question of "financial timing". :P

Anyway, I've been giving this a fair bit of thought today and I think I 
have a rough idea of what I can reasonably cover in a two-hour talk that 
would still be useful. Basically;

- What is a cluster and what isn't it.
- What are the different types of clusters.
- What problems clusters solve and what problems they introduce.
- Cluster-specific terminology, hardware and software.
- A (very) quick overview of Xen; What is it, what is domO vs domU.
- Overview of an example 2-node cluster using shared storage via 
DRBD+LVM hosting Xen VMs
- How networking in the above clustering works... one *big* gotcha.
- How to make a cluster stable. "A running cluster is not, in itself, a 
stable cluster (another huge gotcha)!

Madi
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