It's pretty straightforward, but there are some gotchas, particularly in the differences between RHEL5 & 6 kickstart templates.
Assuming your version of xCAT supports RHEL6, you'll want to run copycds
on the ISO or a DVD first. If you don't want to change the template name,
just add rhels6.1 (or whatever version you're testing) after the template
name. For example, your default (RHEL5) template could be compute.tmpl
whereas your rhels6.1 template would be compute.rhels6.1.tmpl. After that,
you can either define a group of nodes in the nodelist table for testing
and then define that group to use rhels6.1 in the nodetype.os table or you
can just define individual nodes in the nodetype table to use rhels6.1.
The biggest problem I've run into in bringing RHEL6 into an existing
cluster running RHEL5 is the differences in kickstart templates. There are
a few common options in a RHEL5 template that will throw up an error in
RHEL6. The way I've gotten around it is to install RHEL6 in a VM on my
laptop and use the /root/anaconda.ks.cfg file as a baseline for my RHEL6
hosts. xCAT provides some RHEL6 templates in
/opt/xcat/share/xcat/install/rh, but IIRC I've run into some problems with
them too.
Other than that, you'll want to make sure any of your custom postscripts
will work w/ RHEL6. The default scripts that install w/ xCAT should work.
If you use otherpkgs, remember that it looks in an OS directory
(/install/post/otherpkgs/{OS}/{ARCH}, so anything in there for RHEL5 will
have to be replicated/rebuilt for RHEL6.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Christian D. Caruthers
Senior Consultant - System x Linux HPC
Mobile: 1-757-289-9872 | Phone: 1-804-327-4559
E-mail: [email protected]
Find me on:
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completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
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9201 Arboretum Pkwy
Richmond, VA 23236-5402
United States
From: Bruce Pennypacker <[email protected]>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]>,
Date: 05/09/2012 04:39 PM
Subject: [xcat-user] juggling rhel5 and rhel6 installs
We have a cluster that consists of a bunch of System X blades and
iDataPlex servers, all being managed by xcat & currently using RHEL 5.
We're planning on starting to do some testing of RHEL 6 and I was
wondering if there's any documentation on how to set up xcat to handle
both OS's in such a way that we could easily test installing one vs. the
other. Unfortunately the Sourceforge site seems to be having problems as
I get an error when trying to access the Documentation page:
> With the exception of Trac, the Hosted Apps platform on the SourceForge
site are offline.
Thanks,
-Bruce
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