Centrally configured, centrally maintained

Even with the complex-sounding architecture mentioned above, configuring and maintaining a cluster of any size is remarkably simple. When running NFSroot with a read-only root filesystem, oneSIS is used to configure certain paths to be read-write. These paths can be configured to be either persistent across a reboot or not by directing them to reside on the local disk, on remote mount points, or in RAM.

Managing system services and configuration files to be class-specific or node-specific is the other central role of oneSIS. In addition, oneSIS provides some power wrapper scripts to consolidate different remote power management and console utilities into a single command. These aspects of the cluster's behavior are centrally configured from a single configuration file within each master image.

Typical configurations are usually minimal, but even complex setups are still easy. The behavior of the entire cluster is easily viewable and modifiable with the control being as fine-grained as necessary.