Advanced Clustering's Cloner software is a purpose built image replication software.  It allows you to easily install or update the software image snapshots (including operating system, and all installed applications) to all of the nodes or a subset of nodes in your cluster.  Designed to be easy to use, and require minimal installation or configuration, you can re-install or restore your entire cluster to factory settings in just minutes.

Features and benefits

• Designed to require very little setup or 3rd party packages installed.  All components needed are common and included in almost all Linux distributions (DHCP, tftp, and rsync)
• After installing and configuring a system so it's "perfect" you can push a snapshot of that system's image to the Cloner server.  Images can be updated from the "perfect" system anytime you wish with only the changes since the last push sent to the server.
• The Cloner server can hold a nearly unlimited number of images (only limited by available disk space).

Cloner comes free with every Advanced Clustering Technologies' Apex Compute Cluster. Find out what else is included.

• Images can install to bare metal hardware - no previous operating system need be installed on the system.  Providing an easy way to add nodes to an existing cluster, or restore a node after hardware failure.
  
• Images can be installed via multiple methods including:
  
  • Network PXE booting (recommended)
  • CD/DVD-ROM
  • USB key
• Optional multicast install for installing large clusters simultaneously without using more network bandwidth.  With multicast installs entire clusters consisting of hundreds of nodes can be installed in just minutes.
• When cloning via the network, nodes can be set to automatically select their image via hardware ethernet address allowing for completely unattended installations.
  
• Recovery CD/DVD-ROMs can be made of any image - including support for spanning media for large images.
• The Cloner server can make an image of itself, perfect for creating backup head nodes or head node recovery DVD-ROMs.
• Images are stored on the Cloner server in an easy to use open format allowing you to manually change an image if necessary.
• Supports nearly every Linux distribution.  Thoroughly tested with RedHat Enterprise, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Fedora, and SuSE.
• Large code reuse between Cloner and Advanced Clustering's Breakin stress-test tool which allows Cloner to support the latest hardware.
• Used by Advanced Clustering in it's factory to install your cluster, so you always have images available to restore your cluster to factory settings.