There is an update to the scale out management stack, bringing xCAT to 2.16.0.lenovo1 (based on 2.16.0) and confluent is now at 3.0.4.

The major change in confluent is the addition of OS deployment support. This includes:

  • Deploy to disk is implemented for RedHat/CentOS 7 and 8, SuSE Enterprise/LEAP 15.3, RHV-H 4.3/4.4, ESXi 6.7/7, and Ubuntu 20.04
  • Boot over USB, as well as over PXE and HTTP/HTTPS over Ethernet, Infiniband, or Omnipath is supported
  • SSH is enabled early during installations and systems may be sshed into more easily during installer execution for monitoring and debug
  • HTTPS boot and install support - All installation activity may optionally be protected by HTTPS
  • TLS CA management - each collective member becomes a TLS certificate authority and signs its own certificate and OS deployment has those authorities added
  • SecureBoot support - When using HTTP boot (instead of PXE), SecureBoot may be enabled throughout the deployment process
  • Encrypted OS disk - For RedHat/CentOS 8.2 and higher, encrypting the OS install disk using the TPM2 is now supported
  • Built in PXE and ProxyDHCP support - Confluent may either coexist with an existing DHCP server without configuring that DHCP server or operate without any DHCP server at all
  • A new genesis distribution is provided for optional use, though no longer required even for PXE driven discovery
  • Partial in-band BMC configuration is available with configbmc facility (can configure dedicated/shared, vlan, and ip address, but user and ipmi config happens remotely)
  • Autodetection of serial port parameters - No longer requires manual specification of console port and speed, it will be detected from firmware
  • New SSH infrastructure strategy - SSH CA is configured and used to sign host keys to enable known_hosts and facilitate host based authentication. This eliminates any transfer or reuse of any user or host private keys, while enabling non-administrative users for node-to-node ssh without user managed keys.

When deciding whether to use xCAT or confluent for cluster setup, a comparison is provided.

Storage volumes with blank names can now be deleted by nodestorage.

Additionally, confluent noderanges now understand .. (two dots) as a synonym for ‘-‘ or ‘:’ to indicate a range of sequential systems.