Virtual hosts or live devices (USB sticks, CDROM) are a convenient way of testing, evaluating, developing or even deploying a software. In the past, OAR had a live CD which offered a pre-configured debian system embedding a pre-configured OAR server with fake nodes to ease the testing of a new release. As we had to often re-build this live CD, for each minor version of OAR, we made a script to construct it from scratch each time. But this script was difficult to maintain and was very specific. Then, Kameleon (one of our gsoc 2009 projects!) came out and we were able to make recipes for each use (but we didn't). Now that Kameleon is stable, we want to develop new evolved recipes to obtain all kind of OAR appliances.

Developping a kameleon recipe requires some system (Linux) skills. Kameleon is only a support to ease this work and the maintenance of it. So, now, we also want to offer a way to easily and quickly make custom OAR appliances, for those that do not want/need to learn kameleon usage. But before that, we need to create a bunch of major recipes for the main usages: ;OAR devel:

This is an evolution of the current oar-devel recipe. We want it to integrate the API unitary and functionnal tests

;RPM based distributions:

We need recipes for, at least, testing the RPM OAR packages on different RPM-based distributions(CentOS, Scientific Linux,…). This also leads to mix the “Oar devel” appliance to obtain a devel appliance for each supported distribution.

;High availability:

The HA support of OAR may be a hard thing to set up (requiring several servers, DRDB setup,…). Offering such an appliance could help a lot the administrator that wants to set up a OAR cluster with a high level quality of service.

;Live:

A live system, with a pre-configured OAR and a desktop ready to use, with a web browser already pointed on the OAR web portal would be very very great for those wanting to evaluate this software. And this is the return of our old live CD

;Zeroconf:

What about a system image that could be directly put on a server(s) and nodes to make a ready to use computing cluster? Nodes integration could be coupled with the Installation and configuration Wizard project or the ComputeMode Next Generation

All the appliances (recipes) should be developed with the ability to make some mixes between them. We then want to offer to our user, a big choice of ready to use appliances. We can think about an automatic nightly build, but we can even imagine a oar-o-matic web interface allowing the user to select options wanted into an appliance that could be generated on the fly (with enough computing power behind, maybe a OAR cluster!)

1. Design the main kameleon recipes listed above
2. Design an interface for users to get the appliance of its choice and a way to keep the appliances up to date

• Kameleon
• GSoC Fault_Tolerance (for HA appliance)
• RINSE for RPM appliances bootstrap
• Computemode