From my point view that you should consider the bare-metal and virtual
machine management to be two levels.
First, use switch-based discovery to discovery bare-metal node and install
ESXI as a general operating system;
Second, manually or using script to define the virtual machine against
certain host. After the vm node definition has done, the hardware control
and OS deployment for vm node will be simple since it's very similar with
the bare-metal node.
You mentioned the discovery of vm. I am curious about this requirement. Is
that because the vm was not created by xcat (like mkvm command), so you
need to discovery the vm from certain host?
xCAT does not have command to discovery/scan host to get vm list. A simple
way is to use 'xdsh' to run virsh command against the host.
BTW, don't your organization think the performance might be a problem to
move from bare-metal to virtual machine?
Thanks
Best Regards
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Wang Xiaopeng (王晓朋)
IBM China System Technology Laboratory
Tel: 86-10-82453455
Email: w...@cn.ibm.com
Address: 28,ZhongGuanCun Software Park,No.8 Dong Bei Wang West Road,
Haidian District Beijing P.R.China 100193
From: Josh Nielsen <jniel...@hudsonalpha.org>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list <xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net>
Date: 2015/07/07 08:28
Subject: Re: [xcat-user] ESXi VM Discovery & Deployment
Also, what will the 'switch' xCAT table look like with multiple VMs on the
same physical host, since the man page for it says "contains what switch
port numbers each node is connected to"?
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:31 PM, Josh Nielsen <jniel...@hudsonalpha.org>
wrote:
Hello all,
Our organization is in the process of shifting our HPC model from an all
physical/bare metal compute cluster to a virtualized compute cluster,
making each physical compute node a standalone ESXi host (without vCenter
licensing or central management). Because we are not using vCenter the
vm-specific xCAT commands are not of much use to us, but I'm not so much
concerned about that as with how to redesign/organize the discovery &
deployment process for VMs on the ESXi hosts.
With our current physical compute cluster we had used the ultra handy
SNMP switch port discovery method to identify and label nodes with
regular expressions, creating compute hosts with simple names like
node0001, node0002, etc. Now the ESXi hosts take on those names and use
the SNMP switch port discovery method for their naming, IP addresses,
etc. But once that is done I need to determine how best to deploy VMs on
top of those ESXi hosts and how discovery will work with them.
Our intended naming scheme will be to name each VM, per host, after the
name of the ESXi host with letters appended to them. So say ESXi host
node0001 will have three VMs deployed: we would name them node0001a,
node0001b, and node0001c. From what I can tell I cannot use the SNMP
method of identifying those VMs. Since I may have to create the VMs by
hand anyway (or deploy from a template), perhaps I can use the most
tedious method of manually populating the MAC addresses, but I am
wondering if anyone has any better ideas for ways to accomplish that. I
would welcome any suggestions or pointers for things that I haven't
thought of yet.
Thanks!
Josh Nielsen
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