On 10/22/24 12:00 AM, Jarrod Johnson via xCAT-user wrote:
FYI, to share my perspective, it's biased since my work is confluent.
Hello Jarrod,
Another complication is that there's several more ways to start. You can PXE
boot and collect mac addresses, but you can also do BMC driven discovery
instead, or just add BMCs manually and run 'nodeinventory nodes -s' to get
there. Which is nice, but requires better documentation so you don't end up
wasting time with an approach you don't like.
Actually a killer feature of xCAT is switch-based node discovery. One
may not be confident enough in sequentially booting nodes in the hope
the discovered order would match the power-on's.
If I had to sort xCAT features (heavily biased toward my use case, which
is HPC stateless), I would probably list :
1. switch-based discovery + BMC initial setup
2. external dns feeding capabilities
3. formulas and aliases handling
4. commandline monitoring commands (revenlog, rpower, ...)
Where does confluent stand relative to those points ? (non Lenovo x86_64
hardware).
Mostly I hear about alternatives that are about OS deployment, so not as many
as concerned with deep BMC operation.
What do you mean by that ?
About stateless deployment, it always questions the delimitation mark
between tools the software offers to configure the image (ex: via
postscripts) and what can be done agnositically from it, often in a more
expressive way (ex: via running ansible inside the chroot before packing).
What's your take about this ?
Also, postscripts paradigm may introduce some "critical sections" (for
instance you could ssh too soon to a node before the postscript which
configures its ssh key runs).
Those of course are general thoughts but I'd be interested to understand
more confluent paradigms (compared to xCAT) around those as from what I
understand (maybe wrongly) confluent has somehow shifted apart from xCAT
relatively simple "pxe this image" paradigm (not to reduce xCAT to only
that)
Thanks for your help
--
Thomas HUMMEL
HPC Group
Institut PASTEUR
Paris, FRANCE
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