Overview

In the last four chapters, we've shown you what a cluster is, provided quick overviews of Tru64 UNIX, TruCluster Server, some technology considerations, designing a cluster, and finally, planning for a cluster configuration. If you 're like many System Administrators and System Architects we know, you've probably felt ready to build your own cluster since picking up this book.

In this chapter, we will discuss how to install and configure Tru64 UNIX to support the successful deployment of TruCluster Server. In addition to providing guidance on how to perform an installation, we will "walk you through" an actual installation that we performed.

We will cover a great deal of material in this chapter. As a point of comparison, HP has devoted two entire reference manuals to Tru64 UNIX Installation (and that is for each version of Tru64 UNIX that is released). Given this body of work, we defer to these reference manuals as the ultimate authority on this subject. Our purpose is to demonstrate what it takes to install Tru64 UNIX to properly support a basic TruCluster Server deployment.

As with any successful implementation of a system, planning is always mandatory. In this case, the planning leads to a strong foundation on which to deploy TruCluster Server. Tru64 UNIX is that foundation on which TruCluster