Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

● About the presentation format● About York University● Our computing labs● How we managed them● How do you manage yours?● Discussion

Geoffrey CarmanYork Universitygeoffc@yorku.ca

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

About the format:

Birds of a FeatherMore about discussion than about presentation.

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

About York University

Third largest University in Canada

47,000 students registered this year.

Very diverse computer support organization.

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

CNS supports a large number of labs, directly or indirectly.

Directly, our primary labs are a 240 seat lab (Computing Commons) and a 75 seat lab (TEL Computing Commons).

The Library have 160 machines that use our resources as well.

Other labs include:75 Seat Glade Lab.110 Seat TEL Nursing Lab34 Seat Teaching Lab30 Seat YUELI Lab32 Seat Petrie Lab50 Seat Calumet Laband assorted smaller labs (5 more, for about 60 more seats)

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

Additionally, the podiums in lecture halls, login to our resources.

We know of about 700 computers across campus, that can use our resources, not counting wireless, residence, and faculty machines.

We have about 35,651 active accounts in one eDirectory tree. All faculties are represented, and they all use it.

We provide remote access to home directory files via a web interface, over WebDAV, AFP, and FTP.

Outages are considered less than amusing by most.

Thus our topic for today, Highly Available Computing Labs.

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

Problems:

Downtime is unacceptable.

Notification of downtime or problems is very difficult, with 14 labs all over campus, computers in all 7 libraries, and 92

lecture halls.

Maintenance windows are required, yet there is a desire for 24/7 operation.

Physical security is tough.

Things break, and updates happen.

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

Our solution:

2 node, Netware 6 cluster for file access. 800GB of disk, 50 MB quotas per user.

So far, so good. Failover is fast, some apps fail better than others, but the recovery is usually pretty good.

Some stats we maintain:

Logins by lab:http://labstats.yorku.ca/

Current Connection count:http://www.yorku.ca/msteam/stats/Novell/acadlabs.2.html

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

Lab images:Windows XP, Client32, Symantec AV Corporate Edition.

Lots of XP Group policies (set locally) to lock down the image.

DeepFreeze (Faronics) secures the machine image, we run a SUS serverfor MS updates, with a maintenance window in the lab for AV and MS Updates to happen at 3AM.

PowerQuest's DeployCenter and PowerCast are used to push imagesout to machines in the lab (during the DeepFreeze maintenance window)7 GB in 10 minute to 220 machines.

Application images are made using Lannovations' PictureTaker. (Now owned by New Boundary and called Prism, whatever).

Managing Highly Available Computing Labs

How do you manage your labs?Things I want to know:

Physical security? How do you secure your machines if the lab is open 24/7?

Imaging? What are you using? (Are you allowed to Multicast?)

Stats? What are you tracking?

Availability? How are you handling it?

DHCP issues? We are seeing some, wondering if it is just us...

Anything else? Discuss!