Comments From the Author (Score 2, Interesting)

I'd like to jump in here and make a few comments.

First, about the book being a "definitive" guide. I cannot possibly claim to be an expert on every topic in the book--in fact, no one person can. The book is definitive, however, in that project leaders from each of the open source projects participated in editing and reviewing the material for the book.

It is an over broad statement to say it is the definitive guide for building any and all types of Linux Clusters. The book describes how to build a cluster that can be used to run mission critical applications to support an enterprise (it has little or nothing to do with working on the "Big Problem" as Pfister would call it).

(The book took four years to write by the way.)

I do hope it helps with the learning curve, but this is one of the advantages of building what I'm calling a Linux Enterprise Cluster--the system administrator can leverage his/her knowledge of Linux and add concepts that will allow them to build a cluster capable of supporting the enterprise.

I did not invent anything new for this book, and you CAN already find just about everything on-line that is in this book. I started work on the book in 2000 because, at the time, I wanted to have a guide book like this one that would hold my hand through the process of building a cluster that could support mission critical applications running GNU/Linux.

Finally, let me just agree with the comments about the number of nodes ("You don't need 20 nodes if 6 can do the job"). This book is not about building clusters for scientific applications where thousands of nodes and sophisticated batch job scheduling systems are required. How many nodes does it take to build the ideal cluster for your environment? I think that will depend on a lot of things including your budget, the impact of the failure of a single node in the cluster, how many instances of your application can run concurrently on a single node, performance bottlenecks from your node hardware, and so on. In my opinion, the ideal number of cluster nodes for an enterprise cluster--from the system administrator's standpoint--is about 10 (in a pinch you can log on to every node fairly quickly).

The cluster this book was based on has been in production long enough (over 18 months) to have undergone a complete hardware refresh by the way; so the text is based on actual experience (not just theory) and, as I mentioned earlier, it has been reviewed by subject matter experts to insure its technical accuracy.