When used in conjunction with xCAT

If you wish to use xCAT to create the confluent configuration, see Configuring confluent from xCAT The remainder of this document is mostly applicable to users working with confluent standalone directly rather than using xCAT to configure.

Using Confluent without xCAT

In confluent, configuration is organized as attributes on nodes. The attributes may be directly configured on a node or inherited from a group. Values may be a straightforward string or an expression as documented in the attribute expressions documentation.

To get started, it is suggested to use the everything group to set universal attributes. The everything group automatically exists and all defined nodes are automatically placed into it, in addition to manually specified and created groups Usually a cluster uses the same username/password across the XCCs (xClarity Controllers). In such a case, it is suggested to set this data as attributes on the everything group:

nodegroupattrib everything console.method=ipmi
nodegroupattrib everything -p bmcuser bmcpass

The nodeattrib and nodegroupattrib commands can either accept key=value or -p key1 key2. The former allows fully non-interactive use, while the latter prompts interactively to prevent the username and password from being inadvertently on screen or stored in your shell history.

From there, adding a specific node using values from the group everything combined with node specific attributes could involve the following:

nodedefine n3 bmc=n3-xcc

Another common task is to create a custom group, with particular meaning to a specific environment. For example, here is creating a custom group called rack1 and using the expression syntax to append ‘-xcc’ to the end of the nodename to use as the XCC address:

nodegroupdefine rack1 location.rack=1
nodegroupdefine compute bmc={nodename}-xcc

These groups, like the everything group can hold any attribute, and may also use expressions or normal values. The process to create a node can include these groups:

nodedefine n1 groups=rack1,compute

At which point, n1 has location and XCC address configured just by virtue of the nodes it was assigned to. Note that membership in the everything group is automatic, even if not listed in the groups for a node to be in, it will nevertheless be considered a member of that group.

At this point, there are a few alternative paths to proceed: