Thanks, Yuan, thanks, Song! Very much appreciated! You guys have some
very valuable points. It will be an interesting time for me for the next
few weeks planning this move.
I might have more questions down the line, especially on the BMC/IPMI side
-- I hope you guys don't mind a few more questions ;-)
thanks for all of your great help!
--imam
On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 7:32 PM, Song BJ Yang <yang...@cn.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> hi techie,
>
> Thanks for your interest on xCAT.
>
> "don't want Xcat to flag the current running systems to provision.", so
> what features of xCAT you plan to leverage in your cluster management? is
> there an existing cluster management tool in your cluster?
>
> This is an interesting question for us, since most chapters in xCAT doc
> focus on how to setting up a new cluster, seems we did not provide an
> explicit guideline on how to switching a running cluster management from
> other tools to xCAT.
>
> some points I can see:
>
> 1.pick up a new virtual or physical server as xCAT management node, since
> xCAT installation will modify the configuration and switch the status of
> some system services such as dhcp/dns/httpd, reusing the management server
> or other servers functioning in your cluster might affect your current
> cluster
>
> 2. a new management subnet for xCAT you mentioned is a good start. I
> suggest you add the compute nodes to this subnet as well as xCAT DB
> gradually, do not add too many compute nodes into this subnet at your first
> step, especially the nodes with applications running on. For the nodes
> you add to xCAT, suggest to remove their configurations as well as
> definitions from your current cluster management tool. Then you can
> consider move a batch of nodes to xCAT once you are sure the whole
> switching process is ok
>
> 3. migration of node definitions might cost a lot of effort, xCAT
> provides some node discovery method(http://xcat-docs.
> readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/admin-guides/manage_
> clusters/ppc64le/discovery/index.html), but you'e better avoid using the
> discovery process which requires node reboot if you do not want to affect
> the current cluster status. You might need to generate the node definitions
> in xCAT by yourself, the bmcdiscover and switchdiscover might help
>
> 4. `nodeset <node> boot` will avoid node provision on node reboot. But in
> some cases, the dhcp response from xcat management node might affect your
> current cluster management. suggest either manage the node exclusively by
> xCAT or stop the dhcp service on xCAT management node if you do not rely on
> it.
>
>
> thanks
>
>
> --------------------
>
> From: techie...@gmail.com
> To: xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> Cc:
> Date: 2017年11月4日 上午12:53:39
> Subject: [xcat-user] xcat integration to an existing cluster
>
> Hi,
>
> I am highly considering using Xcat in our current cluster, it seems to be
> better adaptable than other provisioning systems I have recently tried.
>
> Having said that, if I did that, what do you recommend for integrating
> Xcat into a running cluster? We have over 300 nodes in the cluster, and I
> don't want Xcat to flag the current running systems to provision. I was
> thinking about starting Xcat with a new subnet, but I am not sure if that
> will be enough. Perhaps there is a way to just add the existing machine
> names, IP #'s, MAC addresses, BMC address/credentials in Xcat and set the
> state to 'boot' (for chain) and hopefully, Xcat will not flag them to
> 'image' during their next reboot or startup.
>
> Looking for suggestions here, Thanks again for the help!
>
>
>
--
Regards,
*Imam Toufique*
*213-700-5485*
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