On 11/3/21 04:11, Kevin Keane wrote:
I have made the almost exact same migration a few months ago
Hello, thanks for your answer.
The only difference is that I'm not using xCAT at all any more.
Satellite can do the same thing as xCAT's stateful installation using
PXE booting. Instead of post scripts etc., I'm using Ansible. Note that
PXE booting will work even if your data center only uses static IP
addresses, as ours does!
I agree that for stateful installs, xCAT is just a kickstart wrapper in
our use case and native RH Satellite install would probably be easier.
However, we're using xCAT for provisionning an HPC cluster which
stateful nodes are just a few admin hosts. Most of nodes are compute
stateless compute servers. There are far more compute nodes than the
other types and batch of new compute nodes are regularily bought by users.
For those stateless servers, key xCAT features for us are:
1) switch-based discovery combined with:
2) regexp/formula to automatically generate predictable and consistent
names and ip addresses
3) BMC remote commands like reventlog, rpower
4) in a very limited way postscripts (we only use confignetwork -s to
"statify" DHCP provided fixed ip addresses and a synclist to fixate
hostkeys on stateless nodes)
This enables us to just nodeadd/makedhcp/makedns and rack a bunch of
servers and have them ready a few minute later to be configured by an
ansible playbook. More important, they can be once unboxed, powered up
all at the same time, not one at a time and still comply to the
naming/numbering scheme and order we want.
We don't use NAT, nodes are accessible under some restrictions.
We've got one vlan for data, one vlan for ipmi
An external DNS is feeded by xCAT on one side, by ansible on the other side.
We find this setup to be the right balance for automation and flexibility.
In host groups, configure all the stuff you would ordinarily configure
at the host level. Satellite Server will pick up those values when it
auto-creates your nodes during the PXE-Boot process.
Again, the issue I'd have is that I'd want a discovery (similar to
switch-based) mechanism to be able to coexist with the stateful
installation process because I want my new stateless nodes to follow, in
order, the naming and numbering schemes I'm using and don't want to
power then up one at a time.
Hence my initial idea to continue using xCAT for the PXE/ks part with
the problems I mentionned in my initial post.
Thanks for your time and answer anyway !
--
Thomas HUMMEL
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