The first step towards building your highly available computer cluster is the operating system installation. We will not cover the details of installing CentOS Linux on the server machines. I can only mention that it is always good practice to install the minimum number of packages required. This is the beauty of using the Linux operating system in general, and also CentOS Linux specifically. CentOS has an option for minimal installation, which actually installs only the basic required packages for normal functioning of the operating system. This is an advantage because the more packages are used, the higher the possibility that one of the packages will go berserk and cause trouble at the operating system level. It is also an advantage for patching the systems, since there are fewer packages to patch.

All the dependencies and required packages will be installed while installing the cluster stack software of your choice. Note that you can...