Changes between Version 3 and Version 4 of ClonezillaInfo

Timestamp:

Oct 25, 2013 2:29:16 PM (11 years ago)

Author:

gerow

Comment:

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ClonezillaInfo

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 This is an analysis of Clonezilla and how it might be integrated into DeterLab as a replacement to the MFS image arrangement we currently have using frisbee to distribute images to Deter nodes. The main motivations behind switching to such a system is that it hopefully is more widely used and, thus, maintained by a number of different projects, and that it might increase the rate at which we can image new nodes, allowing us to bring experiments up more quickly.
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 == About Clonezilla ==
 
 Clonezilla is a project started by a Taiwanese research lab called the NCHC (National Center for High Performance Computing) as a way to more easily provision their large high performance computing clusters. Development on the project seems to be active with the last major release being 2.1.2-20 released on 3 July 2013.
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 === Clonezilla’s Purpose ===
 
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 Once this initial setup process is finished we can then tell the Clonezilla that we would like to image A and B. This process starts a udpcast server on the Clonezilla server. Then we should restart A and B. When the start back up Clonezilla will serve each of them a Linux based boot image over PXE that runs a udpcast command in order to grab the image and throw it on to a local drive/partition. Because of the way that udpcast works it will not start transmitting until all the nodes have rendezvoused or until a timeout expires. After this the udpcast server will serve up the image and A and B will pipe this data into an image restoration program that will write it to the drive. Once this is finished the machine will restart and PXE boot again, but this time will chain into the newly restored image.
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 === Composite Parts ===
 
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 dd is exactly what you’d expect, it simply runs dd on the partition and writes it to a file.  The file is generally gzipped to save some space, though it still ends up being very large. Since the above systems support most of the common file system formats dd is rarely used, though it is available if a partition’s file system is unsupported.
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 === Clonezilla’s Shortcomings ===
 
+As of version 2.1.2-20 Clonezilla doesn't actually support multiple image restore sessions happening on the same LAN. This is something that would definitely need to be remedied if it was adopted by DeterLab. On the positive side, though, this isn't a problem with udpcast itself. Udpcast uses a default multicast address that Clonezilla doesn't change right now. Adding support for multiple restores would only involve modifying the way that Clonezilla calls udpcast to ensure that we have each restore session happening on its own multicast address.
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 === Performance Numbers ===
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 In order to test potential performance of Clonezilla in comparison to the current frisbee system I created a deter experiment for testing each. The Clonezilla experiment used three Ubuntu machines with one server imaging two clients while the frisbee experiment used three FreeBSD 9 machines running frisbee (this is due to the fact that while Frisbee’s imagezip and imageunzip programs compile on Linux