Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Two Stacks are better than one

Leading on from the last post, we have also re-introduced a new test cluster. This infrastructure is housed within the same rack as our old worker nodes  but is completely independent of the production cluster. Supporting a Dell 8024F are 5 servers and a Dell 5000 series switch which are connected via an independent 1 gigabit fibre connection to the University's network.

The purpose of this cluster is to test IPv4/IPv6 dual stack connectivity for grid Services, the testing of switch based security mechanisms and SL6 NAT testing without fear of impacting the real cluster.

The IPv6 connectivity model testing will be in multiple phases which include:

* SLAAC
* IPv6 to IPv4 tunneling
* IPv6 Routing


This framework is designed to comply with the HEPIX IPv6 Project and to look at the possible connection models required by Tier-2s to utilise IPv6. Additionally, we will be testing a wide variety of Grid enabled applications and associated systems such as Nagios to investigate potential issues within a dual stack deployment.

More on this soon.

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