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About Perceus

Perceus is the next generation of enterprise and cluster provisioning toolkit. Created by the developers of Warewulf (one of the most utilized Linux cluster toolkits), Perceus redefines the limits of scalability, flexibility and simplicity. Perceus has the advantage of being planned out from inception, and with this we are able to deliver what we feel is the definitive solution for all cluster platforms regardless of their clustering needs or software budget.

The de facto freely available, stateless community solution has been Warewulf for many years now. Facilitating open customization and site-required technologies without trading scalability, ease of use or simplicity, Perceus maintains this tradition and even takes it further. Capable of the same proven stateless node provisioning ideologies, we are now also able to easily implement other provisioning methods for greater flexibility (e.g. stateful and hybridized solutions).

What is perceus?

Perceus is the next generation cluster and enterprise tool kit for the deployment, provisioning, and management groups of servers. Employing the power of the Perceus OS and framework, the user can quickly purpose a machine out of the box. Perceus truly makes a computer a commodity, allowing an organization to manage machines in a scalable fashion.

Perspectives

Computer Perspective: The computer is identified solely by its MAC address; it knows nothing about itself: what OS it should run, what hostname it should have, or what IP address it should be given. The machines introduces himself through PXE, telling Perceus its MAC address.

Perceus Perspective: Once Perceus knows about the MAC address, it has an established relationship with the computer. Based on the submitted MAC address or identity, Perceus issues the computer an OS, hostname, optional IP addresses, etc. It can also issue other customizable parameters such as nfs mounts, runscripts, and /etc/sysctl.conf.

The mechanism:

Perceus functions like a two stage rocket. In the first stage, the computer is booted into the Perceus OS. The Perceus OS interacts with Perceus daemon on the master node to make preparations for the second (and final) OS. Perceus downloads, configures, and customizes the image of this second OS. At this stage, Perceus can set the hostname and the IP address and perform other customizations. When the preparations are complete, Perceus enters the second stage by spawning the second OS through kexec.

Flexibility

By expanding on the proven Virtual Node File System (VNFS) technology invented by Warewulf, Perceus can provision hardware from bare metal with any of the premade VNFS capsules or a custom VNFS capsule that you can create for it. Some of the features include:

• Intuitive interface
• Extremely modular design
• Most popular freely available VNFS capsules supported and downloadable
• Capable of provisioning and managing systems from bare metal (local disks optional)
• Automatically detect "new" machines (nodes) though the network interface's MAC address via PXE
• Deploy a machine with a Linux OS in RAM or via a network file system - stateless (diskless)
• Install an OS to disk (stateful)
• Manage machines/nodes

And since it's open source, you can customize Perceus for either HPC applications or commercial data center requirements.