Kurt, Glad to hear you are interested in getting together at SC. Hopefully there will be others interested in joining, if not in person at least virtually through a zoom. With respect to continued support for xCAT I’ve had numerous conversations about the possibility of keeping xCAT alive and what it would take to move it forward. These conversations have included discussions with Nathan Besaw at IBM, Jarrod Johnson of Lenovo, Marcus Hilger of Megware, Vinicius Ferrao as well as vendors including Dell.
For our part, RedLine, is a systems integrator and like most of you all on this mailing group we have a long history with xCAT mostly as users but also occasional contributors. I too would like to see xCAT not only continue to exist, but to also move forward. The IBM team had dedicated/paid staff working on the xCAT project. I believe it will take dedicated developers to move xCAT forward. For our part, we have been looking to vendors and other entities to gauge their interest in funding continued support and development. The model that SchedMD employed to support development and in particular fund additional features for Slurm seems to me like a model that could be emulated. RedLine is interested in either leading or being a significant part of the team that moves xCAT forward. We would like to see the xCAT community continue to exist, supporting an open source product that is vendor agnostic. One idea that has come from separate conversations with Nathan Besaw, Jarrod Johnson and Marcus Holger would be to continue support for xCAT2 primarily by the community. This would be things like keeping the code base up date and working with various operating systems, e.g. SLES and Ubuntu etc. Parallel to that activity is considering Confluent as the next evolution of xCAT, or xCAT3. In working with Jarrod to get a basic Confluent setup in our lab, I can offer the following observations: 1. It has a similar feel as xCAT albeit with different commands. This should be no surprise given that Jarrod worked on xCAT for many years and supported the community even after starting Confluent. 2. It is more modular and less monolithic than xCAT. These are both good and bad in my opinion. For instance, I’m used to the makehosts, makedns, makedhcp process that xCAT uses the manage those requirements. DNS and DHCP are not assumed or even 100% required with Confluent so it’s not really built-in. This could be fantastic or this could be a real pain if you’re not a DNS/DHCP veteran and it’s a requirement for your setup. 3. When I first started with xCAT I found the Sumavi tutorials written be Vallard Benincosa. It walked me through the most important features of xCAT by taking me through an example installation. I think that Confluent could use an example based installation guide written from the perspective of a Sys Admin. 4. Documentation in general is sparse and from my perspective needs considerable work. 5. Appears to have been written with an eye to security, more so than xCAT is today. 6. More modern options with respect to booting, pxe and http; RedFish integration for hardware management and monitoring are examples. 7. Written in Python vs. Perl, which seems to be really just a more popular language these day. These are just some of my observations and I’m sure Jarrod can correct or comment on my thoughts. I’ve discussed these ideas with both Nathan Besaw at IBM and Jarrod’s management team at Lenovo. Neither has committed to this path but both are considering it. Hopefully this will spur more dialogue and more ideas. -Don —— Don Avart CTO RedLine Performance Solutions, LLC (703) 634-5686 dav...@redlineperf.com > On Sep 30, 2023, at 3:08 PM, Kurt H Maier via xCAT-user > <xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 05:56:26PM -0400, Don Avart wrote: >> All, >> Would there be interest in an unofficial “birds of a feather” type meeting >> for xCAT at SC23 to discuss the future of xCAT? I may be able to line up a >> conference room for folks attending to get together. If there’s interest I >> assume we can also include a Zoom or Teams conference for those unable to >> attend. > > I'm interested in participating. If no formal organization coalesces to > adopt it, I'll probably wind up personally forking and maintaining the > codebase. > > khm > > > _______________________________________________ > xCAT-user mailing list > xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
_______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
