In a nutshell, much of the same things it gives HPC clusters. In broad
terms (a subset, the comprehensive list is probably too overwhelming to
consider anyway, since no one uses every feature in one place)
-Headless unattended mass deployment and replacement of IT equipment (e.g.
service processor initial configuration, mac address and uuid inventory by
entity physical location in an ethernet switch or blade enclosure)
-Baremetal VLAN provisioning (in select Cisco and IBM ethernet
configuration)
-DHCP, DHCPv6 and DNS configuration management
-Active Directory integration (when desired) including user and machine
account provisioning and management
-Ability to create virtual machines under vSphere, libvirt managed KVM
virtualization, and POWER LPAR
-Scripted OS deployment to bare metal or virtual machine (Windows, ESXi,
RedHat, SuSE, and AIX operating systems)
-OS image capture and deploy
-Stateless and statelite os operation (boot to RAM/NFS/etc instead of block
devices)
-SAN cloning for baremetal SAN boot and virtual machines (though IMHO SAN
cloning is not the optimal VM approach)
-Virtualization cloning in libvirt and vSphere
-VM migration
We plan/hope to hit RHEV-M/oVirt support and Debian/Ubuntu support in the
coming months.
While we have some rudimentary placement algorithms for virtual machines,
mostly the focus is on scalable request handling, abstraction, and baked in
commands linking things together that generally make sense but typically
involve a lot more work than it should. An example to explain the latter:
a provision command depending on configuration might touch NetApp filers,
DHCP server, DNS, active directory, and IPMI service processor to achieve
the goal but not require the requester to understand all of that.
In terms of user portal and sophisticated workload or virtualization
placement engine, xCAT is generally paired with other software. Sometimes
the software uses our virtualization support (e.g. Platform, LoadLeveller,
and Moab), and sometimes the configuration does not (e.g. we have been used
to do baremetal work to bootstrap an OpenStack environment).
At least that's my take/intent. I welcome other comments, particularly
opinions of how well or not well we achieve any of these particular goals
in the minds of users....
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Mario Trangoni <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I want to ask if someone has any kind of documentation about what xCAT is
> actually offering about Cloud.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Mario Trangoni
>
>
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