Hello friends,
I am new to concepts of clustering, so far I've been doing quite a things on simple servers (linux). Now I wish to learn and understand concepts of clustering. I will be taking it as my career. I have already tried a few things and read few articles on web related to clustering, but more I read more the things get unclear, I have successfully set-up one High Availability cluster on virtual machines using rhel5.5, but doing that alone is not helping me to get the clear picture. One thing that I understood is I need to learn more about distributed systems and services, but I have few questions. I hope experienced guys who are already are working in clustering domain can help me with them.

ok here is my list of questions

1) What concepts/technologies I need to understand before I can start learning clustering?

2) What should be my starting point to get good idea of clustering?

3) what is minimum infrastructure(pc-hardware) needed to learn clustering?

4) Is it possible to learn and try all major things in clustering on virtualize-ed environment?

Thank you
regards

Well networking is very important. Figuring why nodes in a cluster can't see eachother is a very useful skill.

Clustering is about distributing work that can be piecemealed into smaller chunks. That's it. I'm not sure from your post what your end goal is. Do you want to administer a cluster? or write software to administer a cluster? or write software to run in a distributed fashion?

Again, what do you mean by "learn clustering" ? I have my 8-core workstation running as a "cluster" that I can submit jobs to. I administer a 64-core server that runs like a cluster. I'm also running a 4 node,32-core cluster of distributed computers. Each of these setups is slightly different, the most complex being the 4 node setup. There is plenty of excellent software out there already to make administering clusters easier (TORQUE/MAUI are one example).

You can get pretty far on a single node (one physical computer) set up as long as it has multiple cores. Large-scale clusters require a good understanding of networking. Of course I'm speaking from my own experience where I have the least amount of knowledge related to networking.


HTH

GATTACA

this messeg was incomplete and was posted by mistake trying to delet it from thread
actual messeg I wanted to type is in post below

Thank you very much for your valuable time and advice.

I will start working on my skills, I am willing to make my career in cluster administration, currently working as l1 technical trainer where I conduct lectures on courses like RHCE, thing that motivates me about clustering is that it is cost effective and it is wast concept, and i've found it challenging

I've read few documentations and blogs over internet about clustering most of them were pointing towards some hardware requirements like 2 alike pc with identical hardware configuration some manageable switches, PDU etc. so my question here was do I really need to buy those things to learn or can I manage with my existing setup.(I know it would be difficult to answer this question, there is nothing like "this is it, it will work for all requirements", but still I would like to learn about day to day most common workings and setups of clusters.)

current hardware I have
pc1
processor : amd phenom ii x6 1090t (6cores)
motherboard : asus m4a89gtd/pro/usb3
ram : 8gb
hdd : 2x 500gb sata
: 1x 80gb sata
NIC : 1x onboard speed(10-100-1000)

pc2
processor : pentium 4
motherboard : vendor:HIS model (not avalilable at this moment)
ram : 512mb
hdd : 80gb ide
nic : 1x PCI (speed(10-100)

Network Devices

swtich : speed 10-100

adsl : 4-port(capable of configuring 4 networks on it)


Thank you once again.
regards