My group has a somewhat interesting support role. So my perspective is a bit different.
We have a limited staff to provide IT support for researchers at our institution. So, we are spread pretty thin across multiple assignments and don’t have time to do the heavy lifting in our HPC environment. For that support we work with an outside business partner. Having said that, we do prefer to document common tasks to allow us to do some of our own support and reduce expenses. Our use case would benefit from the ability to create standardized reports for Management (or at least collect audit information), monitor for hardware failures, kvm, and power). A web interface would be nice but I know that all of things mentioned are just a wishlist for our specific needs. Anyway, one can dream…🤗 Sent from my iPhone On Oct 22, 2024, at 6:35 AM, Thomas HUMMEL <thomas.hum...@pasteur.fr> wrote: 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 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 _______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user__;!!KOmnBZxC8_2BBQ!xdxNz2FXeeC-Uup5MeKFXSUl52k6jIBAR8m2QSY-BaoJEnJGiBTm0xU_02Ch3b6GJTZDrEqXimpcxwR86mZYjup3wMfd$ IMPORTANT WARNING: This message is intended for the use of the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged and confidential, the disclosure of which is governed by applicable law. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this information is strictly prohibited. Thank you for your cooperation.
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