Speaker
Mr
Robert Frank
(The University of Manchester)
Description
The year 2012 brought many changes and improvements to the Manchester Tier2.
Hardware upgrades to new and more energy efficient machines reduced the number of machines while keeping the available resources consistent. The whole network was upgraded to 10G, from 4x1G bonded connections for the storage elements and from 1G for all other machines. The external connection was already on 10G.
The Grid services were upgraded from gLite 3.2 to EMI-2. Prior to the upgrade, all services were running on dedicated hardware. Most of the new servers were turned into KVM hypervisors and the upgraded services were installed as virtual machines. The introduction of virtualization allows to use the new servers more efficiently, as well as reducing the time and effort needed to set up, test and upgrade services.
Like many other sites, Manchester is moving away from CFengine towards Puppet. Some of the services were moved to Puppet during the upgrade, while others were kept on CFengine, due to the close deadline for the upgrade. The Puppet work is still a work in progress and more machines will be moved to Puppet gradually.
The UK NGI VOMS service was hosted in Manchester and was administered by the NGS. There were two distinct sets of servers, the GridPP and the NGS servers. To move to a more unified service provision, the VOs hosted on the NGS service were migrated to the GridPP service and the NGS service was decommissioned. Administration of the GridPP service became the responsibility of the Manchester Tier2 team.
We describe the changes to the Manchester Tier2 infrastructure. How we approached them, what challenges we encountered and how we solved them. We describe the recent changes to the UK NGI VOMS service. We detail the transition process and changes to the resilience mechanisms.
Primary authors
Alessandra Forti
(University of Manchester (GB))
Mr
Robert Frank
(The University of Manchester)
