The two things I would like to discuss: -For those that really want to use foreman/satellite, we have been doing work to make sure that confluent's discovery can be done without controlling DHCP, including the same switch based discovery. It can then use that data to feed into satellite for those that want to. Or anything that wants either uuids or mac addresses.
-For built-in os deployment, I'm looking for feedback on how better to enable satellite experience beyond what I have seen personally (put in a katello rpm to the install and let it go from there). I think confluent is easier than foreman, but then again, I'm biased. While you can provide mac addresses, it tends to use uuid for itself to support multi-interface boot more easily (notably install and aggregate a would-be lacp link will be extremely easy, with either nic being sufficiennt for boot). Also supporting IPv6 or IPv4 HTTP boot, as well as remote media boot or pxe boot, and secureboot compatible http and remote media boot. Note on the diskless, in the next coulpe of weeks confluent's diskless support is coming out for anyone interested. It's a bit easier, supports using the TPM to have a stateful trust relationship, and reduces memory consumption by default to be in the same ballpark as an install-to-disk for memory usage. ________________________________ From: THomas HUMMEL <thomas.hum...@pasteur.fr> Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 8:13 AM To: xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net <xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: [External] Re: [xcat-user] RedHat Satellite and xCAT stateful installs 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 _______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.sourceforge.net%2Flists%2Flistinfo%2Fxcat-user&data=04%7C01%7Cjjohnson2%40lenovo.com%7C2844180ed7164874714c08d9a2b9b9cd%7C5c7d0b28bdf8410caa934df372b16203%7C1%7C0%7C637719740851572014%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=U697W6SyuoBsO4zPP98D%2FuHpSaErOl68vMqiokWNLxk%3D&reserved=0
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