Putting it all together

A typical deployment of MDS4 will enable a project to:

  • discover needed data from services in order to make job submission or replica selection decisions;
  • evaluate the status of Grid services for a project testbed;
  • be notified when disks are full or other error conditions happen;
  • visualize the state of services.

MDS should be deployed in a distributed fashion. Some components should be deployed central to a VO, while others should be deployed on individual resources.

In order to deploy a project or VO-wide MDS4 setup, we recommend the following steps.

Note: The services deployed do not need to be run on the same host or be at the same location.

  1. For clusters (or Condor pools), make sure that Ganglia (or Hawkeye) is configured and running properly to view cluster information in the Index Service. Please see Cluster Monitoring Information and the GLUE Resource Property for more information. Once properly deployed, you can view the scheduler and cluster information, whose format is defined by XML schema definitions, located at $GLOBUS_LOCATION/share/schema/mds/usefulrp/batchproviders.xsd and $GLOBUS_LOCATION/share/schema/mds/usefulrp/ce.xsd.
  2. Set up the Index Service:

    1. If you want to set up a site-wide Index Service with all services and resources for the project at that site registered to it, including those provided by Ganglia or Hawkeye, please refer to System Administrator's Guide.
    2. If you want to deploy an Index Service to act as the centralized data source for the VO to collect information about all of the resources in the VO, please see Deploying WS MDS in a Virtual Organization.

  3. Install the WebMDS release to view the contents of a central Index Service in a web browser (please see System Administrator's Guide for more information).
  4. Deploy a Trigger Service notification script to alert interested parties about changes in the status of the VO (please see System Administrator's Guide).