how to define and create your first xCAT cluster easily?

how to define and create your first xCAT cluster easily?

The inventory templates for 2 kinds of typical xCAT cluster is shipped. You can create your first xCAT cluster easily by making several modifications on the template. The templates can be found under /opt/xcat/share/xcat/inventory_templates on management node with xcat-inventory installed.

Currently, the inventory templates includes:

1. flat_cluster_template.yaml:

   a flat baremetal cluster, including openbmc controlled PowerLE servers, IPMI controlled Power servers(commented out), X86_64 servers(commented out)

2. flat_kvm_cluster_template.yaml: a flat KVM based Virtual Machine cluster, including PowerKVM based VM nodes, KVM based X86_64 VM nodes(commented out)

The steps to create your first xCAT cluster is:

1. create a customized cluster inventory file "mycluster.yaml" based on flat_cluster_template.yaml

    cp /opt/xcat/share/xcat/inventory_templates/flat_cluster_template.yaml /git/cluster/mycluster.yaml

2. custmize the cluster inventory file "mycluster.yaml" by modifying the attributs in the line under token #CHANGEME according to the setup of your phisical cluster. You can create new node definition by duplicating and modifying the node definition in the template.

3. import the cluster inventory file ::

    xcat-inventory import -f /git/cluster/mycluster.yaml

Now you have your 1st xCAT cluster, you can start bring up the cluster by provision nodes.