xCAT Administrators Guide

This documentation is not complete and will probably always be a work in progress. xCAT moves very quickly and keeping updated documentation is a very big challenge. If you see anything lacking, please post a comment and we will address it ASAP.

This documentation targets installing, configuring, and running xCAT on the x86_64 bit platform with RedHat Linux or RedHat (5.5-6.0) derivatives such as CentOS, Fedora, and Scientific Linux. We also provide documentation for VMware and KVM. In addition we attempt to add troubleshooting tips where we run into them so as to get the reader up and running as quickly as possible.

In short: This documentation only documents the parts about xCAT that most people care about :-)

What is the difference between this documentation and that on the xCAT website?

Focus

We document the xCAT features we and our customers use. Therefore the focus is on how we use, install, configure, and troubleshoot xCAT. While xCAT also supports AIX, SUSE, IBM Power processors, and Linux on Z we omit documenting these platforms and refer you to the xCAT site for more information. We wanted a quick reference for the activities that we do here at Sumavi that was easier to navigate through.

There are also commands in xCAT we feel are redundant and add confusion. These commands: lsdef, chdef, mkdef, rmdef were added for legacy CSM customers and are used much too extensively in the current xCAT documentation.

Style

The main xCAT documentation used to be in the form of open documents and PDF files. We wrote a blog and criticized this. Since then the xCAT community has done a great job of taking this feedback. Huge changes have been made. The official xCAT documentation has been moved over to wiki pages (to make it easier to update) and the notion of a wiki gives people the chance to comment on it. The xCAT documentation is much better than it has been.

However, there are still things that we are not happy with:

- You have to log in to be able to comment. (We feel this prevents a lot of people from making quick updates and comments)

- The organization is still rather IBM centric. While we have only positive things to say about IBM, we like to promote that xCAT works on all hardware.

Intellectual Capital and Control

A documentation project can be as time consuming as the project it is documenting. We have visions of creating a book one day of the online documentation found here. The xCAT open source model would necessitate that we give up all rights to the documentation should it be published on xCAT's site. Sumavi already does this with it's contributions to the xCAT open source project. (We contribute more to xCAT than any organization outside of IBM). As such, we'd like to retain rights to our documentation, but at the same time make it open to you.

We recognize that if we did work more with the community on the documentation it may provide a better experience for all involved. invite open criticism and dialogue via the commenting system of this site. We at Sumavi are committed to providing the best resource for xCAT related material, education, and services.

Questions? vallard@sumavi.com

xCAT is hosted at http://xcat.sf.net.

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