Rather than cover NFS Diskless as an area to manage, I'm going to deviate from the format found throughout this chapter and instead, provide a brief description of NFS Diskless. This topic was introduced with HP-UX 10.x. Diskless nodes were implemented with Distributed HP-UX (DUX) in HP-UX 9.x and earlier releases. Distributed HP-UX was first introduced in HP-UX 6.0 in 1986 and was successfully used in many HP installations. The new implementation of diskless nodes as of HP-UX 10.x is NFS Diskless. It has many desirable features, including the following:
Many additional features of NFS Diskless exist; however, since our focus is on management, let's take a closer look at this. Using SAM, all tasks related to NFS Diskless administration can be performed. This means that you have a single point of administration for the cluster. You have cluster-wide resources, such as printers and file systems, that can be managed from any node in the cluster. You can defer some operations until a later point in time if a node is unreachable. And, of course, you can add and delete clients in SAM. Using SAM, you get a single point of administration for several NFS Diskless systems. This means that performing an operation in SAM affects all systems in the cluster. The single point of administration areas in SAM include:
Although a great deal could be covered on NFS Diskless and the many improvements in this area over Distributed HP-UX, the key point from an administrative perspective is that SAM provides a central point of administration for NFS Diskless administration. All tasks related to NFS Diskless administration can be performed through SAM. |