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 following seems to work well:

• getmacs
• rinv

rpower works but there are some glitches where it doesn't return status correctly.  We'll be fixing that to make sure it does.  rpower <noderange> boot (which we rely on a lot) is non functional.  (Mostly I think because rpower off and on don't work all the time as expected.) rvitals is not set up either. Its been good to see how xCAT is able to function on many vendors platforms.  I think this is one of the things that makes it uniquely positioned among data center management solutions is that it is able to excel in heterogeneous environment.  I hope this also dispels any myths that xCAT is an IBM product.  While its legacy is IBM, it has evolved into an open source project that can be used by many organizations desiring data center management without vendor hardware lock-in.