Hello Wang,
Thank you for the interaction.
>*From my point view that you should consider the bare-metal and virtual
machine management to be two levels.*
Agreed, though I want xCAT to have node definitions for both levels,
because I want OS deployment to be handled by xCAT for ESXi and for our
Centos VMs.
>*First, use switch-based discovery to discovery bare-metal node and
install ESXI as a general operating system;*
Agreed. I pretty much have that figured out at this point.
>*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.*
This is where I am more fuzzy on what to do. I plan to PXE deploy the OS
images to the VMs once they are created, so I need xCAT to know the VMs'
details like their MAC address, node name, etc. exactly as classic
"discovery" would provide, so that when an unprovisioned VM boots and
contacts the DHCP server and then continues down the boot chain that xCAT
recognizes the node, can assign it an OS hostname, and proceed with the OS
installation as with traditional physical node deployment. However I cannot
use SNMP switch discovery at that second level of abstraction for the VMs.
So two questions really:
1) What are my best options for creating the VMs on the deployed standalone
ESXi hosts to start with? Use the esxcli command line (is that what you
meant by 'script')? Or just connect with the vmware client into the ESXi
host via the GUI and step through the VM wizard manually?
2) Once I have created the VM, what are my best options for discovery &
deployment? SNMP location-based discovery & node definitions (using regular
expressions) seems out of the picture with VMs. So that leaves manually
populating the MACs myself, or sequential discovery so that they boot up in
the right order and PXE boots the correct image for the node definition.
>*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?*
Sorry, I failed to mention that we are getting a new compute cluster and
switch fabric to support the production compute which will be virtualized,
and the legacy compute will be made a development cluster (also which has
less resource demands).
Regards,
Josh Nielsen
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Xiao Peng Wang <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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: [email protected]
> Address: 28,ZhongGuanCun Software Park,No.8 Dong Bei Wang West Road,
> Haidian District Beijing P.R.China 100193
>
> [image: Inactive hide details for Josh Nielsen ---2015/07/07
> 08:28:49---Also, what will the 'switch' xCAT table look like with
> multiple]Josh
> Nielsen ---2015/07/07 08:28:49---Also, what will the 'switch' xCAT table
> look like with multiple VMs on the same physical host, since
>
> From: Josh Nielsen <[email protected]>
> To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]>
> 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 <*[email protected]*
> <[email protected]>> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Don't Limit Your Business. Reach for the Cloud.
> GigeNET's Cloud Solutions provide you with the tools and support that
> you need to offload your IT needs and focus on growing your business.
> Configured For All Businesses. Start Your Cloud Today.
> https://www.gigenetcloud.com/
> _______________________________________________
> xCAT-user mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Don't Limit Your Business. Reach for the Cloud.
> GigeNET's Cloud Solutions provide you with the tools and support that
> you need to offload your IT needs and focus on growing your business.
> Configured For All Businesses. Start Your Cloud Today.
> https://www.gigenetcloud.com/
> _______________________________________________
> xCAT-user mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't Limit Your Business. Reach for the Cloud.
GigeNET's Cloud Solutions provide you with the tools and support that
you need to offload your IT needs and focus on growing your business.
Configured For All Businesses. Start Your Cloud Today.
https://www.gigenetcloud.com/
_______________________________________________
xCAT-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
