Abstract
System deployment of a computer environment plays a critical role in the daily administration of computer systems, and tasks of massive deployments may take a lot of time for data center administrator(s). The existing solutions for massive deployment normally consist of storage spaces and extra computer servers for running deployment services. Existing solutions of multicast massive deployment are not robust because the overall deployment performance will worsen if one client machine fails. Because of the limitation of the network protocol, a multicast solution is not scalable. Although scholars have proposed solutions based on BitTorrent (BT) to overcome performance and scalability problems, solutions are not good enough because they still require the storage space to save the image file. In this paper, we present a novel mechanism of massive deployment called “BT deployment mechanism from the raw device” (BDMfRD), which differs from conventional solutions in that it avoids creating any image file in the deployment process or using external storage for it. The proposed solution was verified by conducting 10 experiments to replicate the 50 GB system of the source machine to 1–32 destination computers. Experimental results showed that the proposed method reduced the total time for deploying 32 computers by 45.289%. The implemented software is the first massive deployment solution that provides light, robust, efficient, and scalable capabilities simultaneously.
Highlights
The activity to enable the uses of an operating system (OS) and applications in computers is called system provisioning or system deployment [1]–[3]
One of the main concerns is the requirement to save an image from the hard drive of the source machine, and the image is converted to the files in file system blocks transferring (FSBT) format and used for the BT seeder to replicate the data to other machines
The software developed in this study, the upgraded Clonezilla live [3], has a lightness feature because it does not need to prepare these three extra resources: (1) no need for storage space to store the image files; (2) no need to prepare an extra server because the source template machine can be booted by Clonezilla live as the server; and (3) no need to insert an extra peripheral component interconnect (PCI) interface card in each machine for sending and receiving data
Summary
The activity to enable the uses of an operating system (OS) and applications in computers is called system provisioning or system deployment [1]–[3]. The processes of backing up or restoring files are called imaging whereas the process of duplicating the data from one machine’s disk partition. Directly to another disk partition, without saving any image, is called cloning. Disk restoring or cloning can be done one to one or one to many in the local disks on the same computer as well as on multiple destination computers. When the process is executed on numerous destination computers, it is called massive system deployment, or massive deployment for short. In order to reduce system administration’s maintenance efforts significantly, an efficient scheme for massive deployment is a must.
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