Management Tips: Remote Parallel Command Execution

If you are looking for what SYSMAN might provide with OpenVMS — the DO command and its ability to execute commands across multiple hosts — though on various Unix platforms, then the following are links to some of the available options for various Unix platforms for distributed command and control.

Entries here are in no particular order:

  • dsh: the distributed shell. dsh is intended to execute a single command across multiple systems; as with many projects, dsh targets beowulf-like cluster configurations.
  • pdsh/pdcp: parallel distributed shell. pdsh is a multithreaded tool, featuring command capabilities and plug-ins that allow extensibility and customization.
  • radmind: radmind is akin to tripwire, and used to manage and monitor (and revert, as necessary) the file system environments across multiple hosts. A suite of tools, radmind includes the nefu network monitor, and various other functions, and the beepage component supports generating radio pages via Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP). (netatalk is here, too; AppleTalk Services for Unix.)
  • tentakel submits commands for execution across multiple hosts using ssh or rsh. (Inactive)
  • ganglia intends to provide clusters and grids with communications and monitoring functions.
  • clusterssh allows you to ride herd on a plethora of xterm displays.
  • distribulator provides ssh-based remote command submission and execution, as well as file-transfer capabilities.
  • The Cluster Command and Control (C3) tool suite developed for the HighTORC Linux cluster by Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL).
  • Pussh (Pythonic Ubiquitous SSH) is a script for sending commands to multiple machines in parallel.
  • Ansible “Ansible parallelizes complex multi-tier rollouts across app servers, databases, monitoring servers, and load balancers”
  • Salt Stack “Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.”

Compared with some of these tools, SYSMAN (even with its profiles) is fairly limited.

Remote Monitoring and Management

One of the prettiest-looking monitoring packages in this area is Lithium (alas apparently retired, as the primary is now working at Apple), though whether that is compatible with OpenVMS and its SNMP has not been determined. There are other monitoring packages including Nagios NRPE; a Nagios daemon has been ported to OpenVMS. The Mac OS X Server package ships with remote management and remote screen-sharing capabilities; with Server Admin, Server Monitor and related capabilities.

Other tools for remotely managing your servers can include Puppet, AutomateIt and Bcfg2.

Revision History

Most recent changes listed first.

  • 16-Jul-2012 — Added Salt Stack and Ansible.
  • 16-Jul-2012 — Lithium has gone End Of Life
  • 24-May-2011 — Tentacle, err, Tentakel has gone inactive. Added Pussh
  • 26-Mar-2009 — added C3; minor text changes.

Comments

BMC Patrol

Among tools with monitoring clients for OpenVMS, the BMC Patrol package (“Now an integral part of BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management PATROL has been integrated into our BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution”) was one of the available distributed-monitoring tools around.