xCAT

ImageX Windows 2008 with vCenter Server

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

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

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

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)

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

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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