FYI, xCAT's vm commands don't require vCenter, though certain functions like
rmigrate and friends are restricted by vmware. Unless the free license is
installed, after which ESXi locks us out of the API (eval mode does not have
this restriction).
So if you stateless boot or install with a paid license or eval license, you
should be able to:
nodegrpch esxguests nodehm.mgt=esx vm.host='|node(sprintf("%04d",$1))|'
vm.nics=default vm.nicmodel=vmxnet3 vm.storagemodel=scsi vm.storoge=(depends on
your scheme for guest boot volume) vm.memory=2048 vm.cpus=1
nodeadd node001a groups=esxguests
mkvm node0001a -s 128
nodeset node0001a <whatever>
rpower node0001a boot
As long as you don't specify a vcenter anywhere, it should just try to deal
directly with the esxi host.
If manually creating due to free license, I think the process as above might be
able to do a rinv <node0001a> without the mkvm or rpower steps (and you can
skip most of the parameters) and it should show mac address.
From: Josh Nielsen [mailto:jniel...@hudsonalpha.org]
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 12:34 PM
To: xCAT Users Mailing list
Subject: Re: [xcat-user] ESXi VM Discovery & Deployment
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
<w...@cn.ibm.com<mailto:w...@cn.ibm.com>> 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: w...@cn.ibm.com<mailto:w...@cn.ibm.com>
Address: 28,ZhongGuanCun Software Park,No.8 Dong Bei Wang West Road, Haidian
District Beijing P.R.China 100193
[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 <jniel...@hudsonalpha.org<mailto:jniel...@hudsonalpha.org>>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list
<xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto: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<mailto: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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