xCAT
xCAT (Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit) is open-source
distributed computing management software used for hardware control,
discovery, and the deployment and administration of clusters.
xCAT software can create and manage diskless clusters. It can
also install and manage many Linux cluster machines in
parallel. Additionally, xCAT is particularly strong in establishing a
high-performance computing software stack, including software
for batch job submission, parallel libraries, and other software that
is useful on a cluster. It is also useful in cloning and imaging Linux
and Windows machines.
Features include:
- Client/server architecture. Clients can run on any Perl
compliant system. All communications are SSL encrypted.
- Role-based administration. Different users can be assigned
various administrative roles for different resources
- New stateless and iSCSI support. Stateless can be
RAM-root, compressed RAM-root, or stacked NFS-root. Linux software
initiator iSCSI support for RH and SLES included. Systems without
hardware-based initiators can still be iSCSI installed and booted
- Xen full virtualized support, including the rmigrate
command to request live migration of a virtualized guest from one host
to another
- Scalability. xCAT 2.x was designed to scale beyond your
budget. 100,000 nodes? No problem with xCAT's Hierarchical Management
Cloud (HMC). A single management node may have any number of stateless
service nodes to increase the provisioning throughput and management of
the largest clusters. All cluster services such as LDAP, DNS, DHCP,
NTP, Syslog, etc... are configured to use the Hierarchical Management
Cloud. Outbound cluster management commands (e.g. rpower, xdsh, xdcp,
etc...) utilize this hierarchy for scalable systems management.
- Automagic discovery. Single power button press, physical
location based, discovery and configuration capability
- Choice of database backend: SQLite,
PostgreSQL,
MySQL
- Plug-in architecture for compartmental development. Add
your own xCAT functionally to do what ever you want. New plug-ins
extend the xCAT vocabulary available to xCAT clients
- Monitoring plug-in infrastructure to easily integrate 3rd
party monitoring software into xCAT cluster. Plug-ins provided with
xCAT: SNMP, RMC, Ganglia, Performance Copilot
- Notification infrastructure to be able to watch for xCAT
DB table changes
- SNMP monitoring. Trap handler handles all SNMP traps
- Node status update (nodelist.status is updated during the
node deployment, node power on/off process)
- Centralized console and systems logs
- Software/firmware inventory command to nodes. Software
inventory to images
- Automatic installation of any additional rpms requested by
the user during node deployment phase and after the nodes are up and
running
- Supports a large number of operating systems
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Last Updated Sunday, April 01 2012 @ 11:59 AM EDT
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