IBM NeXtScale System - Page 234

216 IBM NeXtScale System Planning and Implementation Guide
򐂰 Flexible monitoring infrastructure
You can easily integrate third-party vendor monitoring software into the xCAT
cluster. Currently, the following plug-ins are provided with xCAT:
–SNMP
–RMC (RSCT)
– Ganglia
– Performance Copilot
򐂰 Centralized console and system logs
xCAT provides console access to managed nodes and centralized logging.
xCAT 2 evolved to support a number of operating systems, including AIX®, and
the many derivatives of Linux, including SLES, openSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, and
Fedora Core. It is also possible for xCAT to provision Windows 2008 through
imaging, and virtual machine (VMware, Xen, KVM) images to hosted systems.
Because xCAT is an open source project, there are no reasons why other
operating systems cannot be added to the supported list in the future.
With AIX and Linux, xCAT supports traditional local disk, SAN disk, and stateful
diskless, which provisions via native deployment methods. Also, support is
provided for stateless diskless nodes including ramfs root, compressed ramfs
root, and NFS root with ramfs overlay support (Linux and AIX) and stateful
diskless that uses iSCSI (Linux).
The xCAT manager works with the relevant hardware control units within the
nodes, BladeCenter, and HMC to instruct these units to perform a number of
hardware functions or gather information about the hosts.
The following hardware control features are included:
򐂰 Power control (power on, off, cycle, and current state)
򐂰 Event logs
򐂰 Boot device control (full boot sequence on IBM System BladeCenter, next
boot device on other systems)
򐂰 Sensor readings (temperature, fan speed, voltage, current, and fault
indicators as supported by systems)
򐂰 Node MAC address gathering
򐂰 LED status and modification (ability to identify LEDs on all systems, and
diagnostic LEDs on select IBM rack-mount servers)
򐂰 Serial-over-LAN (SOL): Use or redirect input and output
򐂰 Service processor configuration