Cluster Management Made Simple

Take control of your cluster without losing sight of your work. Every Apple cluster solution comes complete with industry-leading management tools. Powerful, intuitive, and flexible, Apple clusters streamline administrative tasks and leave you more time to focus on your research.

The Ultimate Management Suite

No matter what your level of IT experience, you’ll find Xserve-based clusters painless to manage. Designed to balance ease of use with flexibility, Apple’s administration tools allow you to configure your cluster, manage network services, and monitor hardware from an intuitive interface. With Automatic Server Setup, you can even configure an entire rack of systems automatically from a network directory or a USB or FireWire disk. If you’re a UNIX user and prefer the power and flexibility of shell scripts, you can access virtually all functionality from the command line instead.

Administration Tools

• Server Admin. Configure, enable and disable network services like NAT, DHCP, Firewall, and others. Monitor the status of all system services at a glance.
• Server Monitor. Using the lights-out management features of Xserve, Server Monitor provides powerful remote management and monitoring features in an easy-to-use interface. Gather system performance statistics and monitor your servers from anywhere.

Client Management

• Workgroup Manager. Manage user, group, and system access policies for the entire cluster from a single application.
• NetBoot and Network Install. Create a single image for your entire cluster and deploy that image across the network without ever touching the software on the nodes.
• Software Update Server. Cache server software updates on the head node, so cluster nodes don’t all hit the network for individual downloads.
• Xgrid Admin. Now any workgroup can quickly build a low-cost supercomputer — with Xgrid, the first distributed computing architecture to be built into a desktop or server operating system.

Keeping Nodes in Check

Power on or power off hardware. Reboot. Perform routine admin. All from a remote Ethernet connection. Xserve unchains you from the server room with new lights-out management. Embedded hardware sensors integrate with Apple’s sophisticated Server Monitor software to check the condition of all critical subsystems — such as memory, fans, power supplies, and Ethernet links — and notify you if there’s a problem.