Hi Don, I am very interested joining virtually via zoom. I would love to see xcat move forward very much. Please count me in .
Thanks On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 1:28 PM Don Avart <dav...@redlineperf.com> wrote: > 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 >
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