package management on clusters

This question is peripherally related to Oracle... but maybe someone has a good idea.
Does anyone have a suggestion for managing packages on a cluster? We typically repackage database binaries as RPMs for wide-scale deployment. Most of the clusters we have currently utilize a CFS. Support scripts are installed onto the CFS with a tarball and we arbitrarily pick a node to install the database server package onto the CFS. The other nodes don’t know that the database package is installed and the OS package inventories across the cluster are out of sync. We manually sync up the Oracle inventories as part of the installation (happily, they are cluster-aware).
Any ideas how we could manage files which are installed into a cluster filesystem and available across the cluster? Should they even be registered in the OS's package DB or perhaps we should just use a tarball? (But we don't want another database server package to make with every build… and there are some great benefits to the package management on non-cluster systems...) Not really interested in actually running the installer in silent mode since it's much faster this way and we have tight control over server configurations the package is getting installed into.
I really can't think of a good solution that keeps the benifits of package management without the downsides of non-cluster-aware-ness on both Solaris and Linux. 

-Jeremy

--
Jeremy Schneider
Chicago, IL
http://www.ardentperf.com

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Other related posts: