Moab Workload Manager
Release Notes

version 5.4

Copyright © 1999-2010 Adaptive Computing Enterprises, Inc.

This document provides an overview of the changes made in a minor release of Moab Workload Manager. A minor release includes significant new functionality and may break compatibility with previous versions.

Contents

This document contains the following sections:

Notice

Distribution of this document for commercial purposes in either hard or soft copy form is strictly prohibited without prior written consent from Adaptive Computing Enterprises, Inc.

Overview

Moab Workload Manager version 5.4 features improvements for the data center and HPC functionality. Key new features include enhanced virtual machine, hypervisor, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) management.

New Features

The following highlights new features and changes:

  • Virtual Machine Management -- VM-related managment capabilities now include the ability to create, power, provision, and destroy on-demand virtual machines. The ability to auto-migrate VMs due to over-utilization/utilization threshold targets on the hypervisor is new, as is the ability to allocate on-demand storage for virtual machines.

  • Hypervisor Management -- Moab now allows for the coexistence of multiple hypervisor technologies within the same cluster/data center. In addition, Moab can be provisioned to allow the over-committing of CPUs on hypervisors. In some approaches, Moab can avoid performance bottlenecks from over-subscription of processor, memory, and network resources through monitoring VM status metrics and initiating live migration to alternative hosts where supported by the underlying hypervisor.

  • Virtual Private Cloud Management Enhancements -- Moab allows users to expand and contract VPC resources on demand to support fluctuations in application workflow requirements over time. In addition VPC migration capabilities maintain service levels in the event of resource failures and planned maintenance schedules. Improved memory usage now allows for many more VPC/IaaS environments to be created in a given system. Internal testing on a range of environments with varying complexity has demonstrated a tenfold increase in the number of VPCs managed within the same memory footprint.

  • Generic Resource Preemption -- Moab now handles workload preemption based on generic resource needs.

  • HA Model -- The "Master Slave High Availability" mode (described in section 21.2.3 of the Moab 5.3 Administrator's Guide) has been deprecated and removed. Sites requiring HA functionality should switch to the "Networked File System High Availability" HA mode.

  • NodeDownStateDelayTime -- The default value for this scheduler parameter has been changed from 1:00:00 (one hour) to -1 (infinity). This change causes Moab default behavior to change such that a down, drained, or corrupt node is unavailble for scheduling indefinitely. On systems running large jobs with many compute nodes in one of these states, additional jobs may be deferred by the introduction of this policy change. Users desiring previous behavior will need to explicitly set this parameter to the desired period.

Installation

Information regarding system requirements, installation/upgrading, and initial testing is available in the installation documentation.

FAQ

This section answers a number of frequently asked questions on this new release.

  • Is Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor supported by Moab 5.4?

    Moab controls the environment through interfaces to software known as resource managers such as HP Operations Orchestration (HP OO) and HP Server Automation (HP SA), IBM's Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit (xCAT), and many others. Support for specific hypervisors depends upon the support provided by the resource manager not Moab itself. Moab has been tested with a variety of resource managers including HP software for VMware and IBM xCAT for support of VMware, Xen, and KVM hypervisors. It is expected that Hyper-V support from xCAT and other resource managers will be available in the future and thus supported by Moab 5.4 and future Moab releases.

  • This announcement seems to be only for data center and cloud customers. What's in it for HPC users?

    Although primarily focused on data center and private cloud customers, Moab 5.4 contains a large number of performance, functional, and efficiency enhancements that benefit the HPC community in addition to being the first release that fully supports multi-OS deployments that include UNIX, Linux, and Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008. Future releases are planned that deliver significant new functionality for the HPC community.

  • Moab Viewpoint 1.0 is for Moab Adaptive Computing Suite. Will it also be available for Moab Adaptive HPC Suite and Moab Cluster Suite?

    The initial release of Moab Viewpoint addresses the needs of self-service portal users in the private cloud market, which is presently focused in the commercial data center. Future releases are planned that deliver Moab Viewpoint features for the HPC community. Moab Viewpoint support for Moab Adaptive HPC Suite and Moab Cluster Suite will be announced at that time.

  • Moab 5.4 adds significant new functionality that takes Adaptive Computing beyond HPC into commercial enterprise data centers. As new technology is it really ready for prime time in production environments?

    Moab has been used in commercial enterprise accounts for many years and is a very well established and proven technology. In fact, since 2007 more than half of Adaptive Computing’s revenue has come from the commercial data center and private cloud computing business. Moab 5.4 was developed in collaboration with leading commercial customers. It has been subjected to extensive testing and early release versions have been used in proof of concept and production environments with select customers for many months.

Additional Resources

Product Information

Moab Workload Manager Documentation
© 2001-2010 Adaptive Computing Enterprises, Inc.