XCAT_2.4_Release_Notes

New Function and Changes in Behavior

  • Support for OS updates: SLES 11 SP1, RHEL 5.5, Fedora12, AIX 5.3.12, AIX 6.1.5
  • Ability to import and export Linux Stateless, Statelite, and Stateful images. See the man page for imgexport and imgimport. This is the easiest way to share xCAT images.
  • Support for DB2 on AIX and p-Linux as the xCAT database (still experimental) See xCAT2SetupDB2.pdf
  • Faster KVM virtualization management at scale
  • Faster setting of table values for large noderanges
  • nodels --blame flag to display if the attribute values came from a group entry in the table or a node specific entry
  • IPMI rewrite with increased performance, lower overhead, and IPMI 2.0 support
  • Windows 7/Windows 2k8r2 deployment
  • Some initial work with RHEL6 beta deployment support, but not officially supported yet.
  • New auditlog table. All xcat commands run from the Management Node will be logged.
  • New command tabprune to support maintaining the auditlog and eventlog
  • Energy management support for system p 755 and BladeCenter.
  • New attribute in site table (powerinterval) to let the rpower wait for a while between each operation, it is useful especially when using rpower to boot diskless nodes in scaling environment.
  • Improve conserver scaling via hierarchical support
  • Plugin loading improvements: warn if 2 different values for the same handled command, load with eval so a syntax error doesn't disable the whole daemon.
  • Appstatus support - monitor and fill in nodelist.appstatus for things like ssh, gpfs, etc. The xcatmon plugin can monitor this periodically. A new flag on nodestat (-u) will correct any out of date status values right then.
  • Additional statelite enhancements. See xCAT-Statelite.pdf
  • Support relative paths in all the commands that accept paths (see bug 2873693 comments)
  • mkvm can create the single partition that is needed for p5 and p6 systems in clusters
  • Option to change pw of MM/FSP/BPA in rspconfig: use old pw to connect, chg pw in device, if successful, change it in db.
  • New -k flag on updatenode updates the ssh keys and host keys for the service nodes and compute nodes, and updates the ca and credentials to the service nodes.
  • Performance improvements for the *def commands.
  • Added a -s readonly (spy mode) option to rcons.
  • Enhancement to prescript framework to allow optionally calling the prescript once for each node.
  • Option to have NIM to use nimsh
  • Enhancements for updating software for AIX diskless and diskfull systems.
  • New postscript (setbootfromnet) to persistently set the system p boot parameters from linux
  • Newly rewritten DNS plugin available (dns.pm.experimental). Many enhancements. Original DNS plugin (bind.pm) still the default.
  • Active Directory machine account creation (partial depedency on experimental DNS plugin).
  • Enhanced performance in various at-scale operations that manipulate table data.
  • Enhancements to genimage, packimage, and updatenode to support "#INCLUDE: ...#" entries in all pkglist, otherpkgs.pkglist, and exlist files
  • Enhancements to genimage and updatenode to support "#NEW_INSTALL_LIST#" entries in all pkglist and otherpkgs.pkglist files to allow lists of rpms to be installed in separate steps
  • Enhancements to support "#INCLUDE_PKGLIST: ...#" entry in SLES AutoYaST templates to convert an included xCAT pkglist file to XML <package> ... </package> format.
  • rinv to report uEFI version (IBM rackmount/iDPX tested).

Limitations and Known Issues

For details see Tracker Bugs .

Related

Wiki: Release_Notes

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