There is an update to the HPC software stack, bringing xCAT to 2.13.8.lenovo2, based on 2.13.8, and confluent is brought to 1.8.0.

Here are some of the highlighted changes:

Added a nodemedia command

There is a new command nodemedia that can manage upload and attaching files as virtual USB devices on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers.

Lenovo switches in the discovery facility as exposed by nodediscover as type lenovo-switch

Lenovo switches will now have their addresses enumerated if their management ports are connected by default. As of 1.8.0, this is merely listing the addresses, and does not yet auto-deploy configuration.

Zero-power discovery of chained ThinkSystem D2 enclosures with newer firmware

confluent can now discover chained D2 enclosures without requiring the nodes to PXE boot. More can be read at chained D2 discovery

Add nodediscover clear

Discovery entries can now be cleared by the clear argument to nodediscover. This can also selectively clear data by specifying the usual selectors documented in the command.

UEFI and other settings can now be managed by nodeconfig

The nodeconfig command has been extended to show UEFI data. To get the previous behavior and only the previous behavior, can do nodeconfig noderange bmc for faster execution. See the man page for more details.

Specifically target different firmware version retrieval in nodefirmware

Notably, nodefirmware noderange core will get only core firmware, which tends to be a quicker operation.

Group membership can now by managed by nodeattrib and nodegroupattrib using ,= and ^=

It is now easier to add and remove nodes from a group, and vice-versa. See the man page for more detail.

Dynamically adjust console session retry timer

Console’s should reconnect naturally on a more aggressive timescale for smaller clusters

Environment variables may now be used to pass attribute values to nodeattrib

-e has been added to the nodeattrib to read values from environment variables. For example, to set a password without it showing up in ps output, export BMCPASS=Passw0rd; nodeattrib n1 -e bmcpass

The web interface has a new rackview

The rackview has been revamped significantly.

Web UI now allows adding/removing nodes and groups

The configuration menu now has options to edit nodes and groups.

Numerous bugfixes

For a complete list of changes, see our git revisions