Since Monday I am at the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and I have started the initial installation of our cluster.The people from the HLRS have offered to support us with the initial installation, which we gladly accepted because they know how to do clusters.
On Monday I installed the three infrastructure servers which are used to control the 180 nodes of the cluster. The cluster is running Scientific Linux and my first task was to get it on those three infrastructure servers.
Those servers have two 500GB disks and they were supposed to be running as software RAID. After the seventh failed attempt to configure the partitions as RAID1 with the Scientific Linux installer we used a Debian install DVD to partition the disks and after the successful configuration of the partitions as RAID1 we installed Scientific Linux on all three systems. Not knowing how to use anaconda to configure a RAID1 (like we wanted to) was a bit embarrassing, but with all the Fedora and CentOS installation I have done I have never configured a software RAID1 from the installer; either the system had only one disk, a hardware RAID controller or I configured the RAID manually after the installation. But at the end of the day all three system were installed and configured for their tasks.
Today (Tuesday) we used the installation to boot the first two nodes of the cluster. All the nodes are running disk-less and are booting over TFTP/NFS from a single read-only image.