Tag: xCAT

ImageX Windows 2008 with vCenter Server

Posted on by Vallard

With xCAT I used the imagex capabilities to clone a machine (virtual machine) with vCenter on it and now I’m installing that captured image to another virtual machine.  One reason I do it this way as opposed to creating a VM Template is that now I’m able to deploy to physical and virtual servers.  In…

State of xCAT on HP Blades

Posted on by Vallard

I had the opportunity this week to test drive xCAT on HP blades. I had a c7000 chassis with some spiffy BL460c G6s. The configuration is very straight forward. We’ve updated the xCAT Install Guide to include how to configure the blades and I think we’ll be doing a lot more. Currently on these blades…

The xCAT Documentation Problem

Posted on by Vallard

Ever since 2001 I remember hearing the same thing about xCAT: “The documentation needs improvement”, “There is a steep learning curve”. Back in those days the quick xCAT-mini-howto was a great way to get going. The problem is that it left out a lot of the important details like service nodes, offloading tftp servers, etc….

Rails and other web services on the same box

Posted on by Vallard

The Sumavisor is built on top of xCAT. The Sumavisor is a rails application, with lots of xCAT plugins that sit on top of the base xCAT.  One thing we had to work out was having a web server host a rails application (the Sumavisor) and allow xCAT to install nodes via HTTP.  The solution…

Windows SAC (special administration console)

Posted on by Vallard

Installing Windows remotely I’ll sometimes only be able to see the SAC> on the remote console output since I may not have a graphical viewer to do rdp or some other tricky way. Once SAC boots up I can access the command prompt by doing the following: cmd (It then gives you a name like…

xCAT and RHAS4 update 4

Posted on by Vallard

Recently I had to add support for xCAT to install Red Hat 4 update 4 for a project I was working on.  I’m using development versions of xCAT 2.3 before all the xnba stuff got put in, so its a real hodgepodge of code. Here is how I did it. 1.  copy the cds:

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