xCAT (Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit) is an infrastructure management system for deploying and administering large groups of computers. It is particularly suited to high-performance computing environments, where administrators need to provision operating systems, control hardware and maintain consistent configurations across many cluster nodes.
The software combines hardware discovery, network provisioning, remote administration and operating system deployment. It can manage stateful installations as well as stateless nodes that obtain their operating environment from centrally maintained images or network filesystems.
xCAT provides tools for issuing commands across groups of machines, controlling power states and maintaining node configurations. Its management architecture supports distributing provisioning and administrative tasks across larger clusters.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automates operating system deployment across large computing clusters.
- Supports stateful and stateless node provisioning.
- Discovers hardware and manages node configuration information.
- Provides remote power management and hardware administration.
- Supports network booting and centralised deployment services.
- Executes administrative commands across groups of cluster nodes.
- Provides tools for copying files and managing systems remotely.
- Supports hierarchical management for larger installations.
- Integrates with cluster networking and infrastructure services.
- Provides centralised node status and management information.
- Supports extensibility through plugins and management scripts.
- Offers role-based administration and access controls.
Website: xcat.org
Support:
Developer: xCAT Consortium and contributors
License: Eclipse Public License 1.0
xCAT is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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|---|---|
| FAI | High quality tool for fully automatic installation of Linux systems |
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| m23 | Software distribution and management system |
| MAAS | Data centre automation platform |
| Confluent | Handle essential bootstrap and operation of scale-out server configurations |
| xCAT | Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit |
| OpenQRM | Systems management platform |
| Uyuni | Configuration and infrastructure management solution |
| Warewulf | Stateless, network-boot cluster provisioning system |
| Tinkerbell | Bare metal provisioning engine |
| Ironic | OpenStack service for managing and provisioning bare metal servers |
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