<p>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.</p>

<p>As tests on Rock PI-X <a href="https://www.mouton.in/blog/20210112_minicluster_testingrockpix/" title="Testing Rock PI-X for cluster node">were successful</a>, 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.</p>

<p>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 <a href="https://www.cetic.be/?lang=en">CETIC</a>, I had to set up and operate <a href="https://www.cetic.be/Cloud-prive">inGRID</a> (<em>in French</em>), a cluster dedicated to Reearch on <a…