Kadeploy3: Efficient and Scalable Operating System Provisioning

Installing an operating system can be tedious when it must be reproduced on many computers, on large scale clusters, for instance. Because installing the nodes independently is not realistic, disk cloning or imaging with tools such as Clonezilla, Rocks, SystemImager, or xCAT is a common approach. In those cases, the administrator must keep updated just one node (sometimes called the golden node) that will be replicated to other nodes. In this article, we present Kadeploy3, a tool designed to perform operating system provisioning using disk imaging and cloning. Thanks to its efficiency, scalability, and reliability, this tool is particularly suited for large scale clusters.