March 2012

On Tuesday, March 20, 2012, we will have a scheduled downtime from 4:00am to 8:00am EDT.

On Thursday, March 22, 2012, we will have a scheduled downtime from 4:00am to 8:00am EDT.

This downtime affects all users of the department\’s computing and networking infrastructure.

Scheduled work includes:

• Deploy new hardware for cycles (soak, wash, rinse, spin)
• Transfer our virtual machines to new infrastructure
• Upgrade the operating systems on penguins (tux and opus) and cycles to version 6.2
• Deploy a new cluster, named ionic, using hardware from the current c2 cluster (and some of the retired equipment noted above).

SPECIAL NOTE: Since we will be re-installing the operating systems on the public cycle servers (penguins: tux, opus; cycles: soak, wash, rinse, spin), crontab entries will be lost. If you have cron jobs that need to persist, please save them before the downtime and restore them afterwards.

After the downtime, c2 will have approximately 50 servers and ionic will have approximately 20 servers. Over the coming weeks, we will reassign approximately 10 servers per week from c2 to ionic until c2 is empty and then retired. More details will be posted on the CS beowulf list.

This work improves the speed and capacity of our general purpose cycle servers as well as our virtual machine infrastructure. This also synchronizes the operating system version of all our public machines (cycles, penguins, and ionic). The new machines (physical or virtual) will be under the configuration control of our recently deployed Puppet infrastructure. This will allow us to more easily keep the operating environments of the servers both up-to-date and in sync.

During some of the 4am-8am window, most of the services (e.g., e-mail, web, cycle servers) will be unavailable. E-mail destined to the department will be queued and then delivered at the end of the maintenance window.