XCAT_2.1_Changes

The following changes are in xCAT 2.1 compared to xCAT 2.0:

• All major xCAT functions now supported on AIX and system p hardware (see AIX Cookbook):
  • database commands
  • hardware discovery
  • hardware control commands (e.g. rpower, rinv, getmacs, etc.) and rcons
  • node deployment: full install, cloning (mksysb), diskless
  • p commands and xdsh/xdcp
  • monitoring plugins: RMC, Ganglia
  • hierarchy (still in progress)
  • virtualization commands (mkvm, etc.)
• Windows copycds/rinstall (security implications, Administrator password in unattend.xml, only Win2k8, needs more media/profiles added)
• Windows imagex support (imaging, no documents on how to properly prepare an image for unattend apply yet.)
• Xen full virtualized support (tested with RHEL5.2 provided Xen host and RHEL5.2 and Windows 2008 guests), paravirtualized not yet implemented. Lacks rinv/rvitals.
• rmigrate command created to request live migration of a virtualized guest from one host to another.
• New Table API functions, getNodesAttribs and setNodesAttribs. This allows the Table to make optimized at-scale calls to the database. getNodesAttribs is significantly faster, setNodesAttribs is not yet performance optimized.
• Performance enhancements on many commands. The performance of several commands when faced with hundreds to thousands of nodes has been improved orders of magnitude (example, for a test environment one command took 30 seconds to process 500 nodes in xCAT 2.0, that command now takes less than 10 seconds to process 10,000 nodes).
  • makedhcp
  • makeconservercf
  • nodeset netboot
  • rpower/rvitals/rinv/etc
  • makehosts
  • nodels
  • All commands needing to expand noderanges
• nodels and nodech now supports selection criteria:
  • nodels all switch.switch==switch1 (list nodes from all group where switch column of switch table is switch1)
  • nodels all switch.switch!=switch1 (list all other nodes that don't match)
  • nodels all switch.switch=~/1$/ (list all nodes that are on a switch that ends in 1 (switch1, switch11, etc)
  • nodels all switch.switch~=/1$/ (list all nodes not matched above.
  • nodels all switch.switch=~/switch/ switch.switch (list all switch.switch values where switch.switch has the word switch in it)
  • nodels all mp.mpa==amm1 mp.id (list slot numbers of all nodes on amm1).
  • nodech all nodepos.rack==2 groups,=rack2 (put all nodes with nodepos.rack of 2 into a rack2 group)
• Console backend startup (xen/blade/ipmi) now are throttled by xCATd, and won't exhaust DB connections if xCATd wouldn't
• Enhanced IPMI support:
  • reventlog decodes more, including IPMI 2.0 extended log data
  • reventlog on read-only no longer susceptible to 'Invalid or cancelled reservation id'
  • rbeacon now uses IPMI v2 variant when available to ensure rbeacon on lasts more than 255 seconds.
• bmcsetup now requires control of a privileged port on target node to divulge data
• Support for MySQL as a configuration backend
• Noderange based acls in the policy are now implemented
• copycds now displays percentages as it goes
• Reduce number of processes per typical command
• xdsh to run commands in diskless images on the management node
• Software/firmware inventory command to nodes. Software inventory to images.
• Enhanced monitoring:
  • New commands: monadd, moncfg mondecfg).
  • Monitoring plugin for Ganglia.
  • Monitoring plug-in for Performance Co-pilot (PCP)
  • Updated monitoring plugin for RMC.
• Automatic installation of any additional rpms requested by the user during node deployment phase and after the nodes are up and running.
• Node status update (nodelist.status is updated during the node deployment, node power on/off process).
• SNMPv3 may now be used to scan switches (run "man switches" for table setup to do this instead of snmpv1 default)
• SOL console on x336/x346 servers now implemented
• gPXE enabled iSCSI support for Linux on x86 and Windows 2008 (experimental).