Confluent is a software package to handle essential bootstrap and operation of scale-out server configurations. It supports stateful and stateless deployments for various operating systems.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Console Management:
- Arbitrate multi-user access.
- Full logging with fine grained timestamps.
- VT-aware buffering for quality reconstitution of a console after reconnect.
- Hardware Control: Essential operations using ipmi, redfish, and/or implementation specific plugins to implement features including:
- Power on/off.
- Set next boot device (e.g. force network boot).
- Configure BIOS/UEFI/BMC settings.
- Configure hardware storage controllers (e.g. create/delete raid arrays and set drive usage).
- Health check.
- Telemetry (temperature, voltages, power, energy, etc).
- Virtual USB device mount management.
- Retrieve support data.
- OS Deployment including:
- Sample profiles for ESXi 6.7/7.0, RedHat/CentOS 7.x/8.x, SuSE 15.x, RHV-H 4.3/4.4 and Ubuntu 20.04.
- Deployment over PXE, HTTP(S)boot, or removable media (real or virtual).
- Does not require a DHCP server, nor does it conflict with an external DHCP server for all deployment methods.
- Support customization during phases of deployment (e.g. post, firstboot, onboot) by local commands or automatically launched remote ansible playbooks.
- Centralized access to network topology information.
- Access mac address table and lldp information across all switches in one interface.
- Rich device on-boarding capabilities.
- Detect generic PXE systems and Lenovo hardware management devices at a glance.
- Rapidly onboard devices manually, based on data such as serial number or mac address, or based on where things are physically plugged in to chassis or switches.
- Scalability and Availability:
- Powerful noderange syntax to describe target systems simply but with great flexibility.
- An attribute database with group inheritance and formulaic attribute derivation for structured data-centers.
- Collective mode enables scaling a single confluent interface across multiple servers or virtual machines for HA and/or to manage thousands of systems.
- Tools to quickly analyze data and highlight inconsistencies or to do quick statistical analysis.
- Security:
- Designed with secure default behaviors with opt-in to reduced security.
- Use of fully validated TLS to protect collective, deployment and hardware management.
- Take advantage of TPM2 to protect boot volumes for supported profiles.
- Use TPM2 to persist node trust across reboots in stateless environments.
- Node authentication options to balance convenience versus hardening to protect .potentially sensitive data such as encrypted root password.
- SSH PKI strategy to securely enable convenient SSH without users having to self-curate .SSH keys or having to update known_hosts.
- SecureBoot is supported for media and HTTP boot methods.
- Flexible usage scenarios:
- Collection of straightforward Linux commands.
- Command line API browser that is like browsing a file-system.
- Python client library.
- REST API over HTTP.
Website: github.com/xcat2/confluent
Support:
Developer: xCAT Consortium
License: Apache License 2.0
Confluent is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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