Decisions of RedHat on CentOS strongly impacted my choices for the minicluster. First of all on the Linux distribution: the roadmap of CentOS is more than ever at the will of RedHat management … which is IBM now. I prefer to switch to a RHEL compatible but autonomous distribution. Perhaps it is a bet but Rocky Linux seems to be a viable choice. At least it will be for the lifespan of the minicluster.

As tests on Rock PI-X were successful, I ordered five other units. The Rock PIs come from China and even if shipping usually takes more than two weeks, it is more than time to prepare provisioning tools.

Many times during my professional career, I found that being able to use a bunch of servers on a dedicated network is very convenient to perform tests and benchmarks of software for infrastructure provisioning, management and monitoring. When starting to work at CETIC, I had to set up and operate inGRID (in French), a cluster dedicated to Reearch on Grid Computing. I also had the opportunity to design a second cluster (in French) targeted as Research test bed to study, test and contribute to…