# Confluent

Confluent handles the essential bootstrap and day-to-day operation of scale-out server configurations. It deploys operating systems, controls hardware, manages consoles, gathers telemetry, and onboards new devices across clusters ranging from a handful of nodes to many thousands. Confluent supports both x86\_64 (amd64) and aarch64 (arm64) architectures.

Confluent is the modern successor of [xCAT](<https://github.com/xcat2/xcat-core>). If you are coming from xCAT, see [Confluent vs. xCAT](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/miscellaneous/confluentvxcat/index.md>).

## Where to begin

- **Get started**

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  Install confluent and take a single example flow from a bare management server to a deployed cluster.
- **Install**

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  Set up the confluent management server on your distribution of choice and open the required firewall ports.
- **Deploy operating systems**

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  Provision stateful and stateless images over PXE, HTTP(S) boot, or virtual media, with customization at every phase.
- **Reference**

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  The building blocks you use every day: node attributes, the noderange language, and attribute expressions.
- **Discover &amp; onboard**

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  Detect generic PXE systems or hardware managers, then onboard them by serial number, MAC, switch port, or physical location.
- **Automate**

  ---

  Drive confluent from the REST API, the Python client library, the filesystem-like `confetty` browser or backup and restore its database.

## What confluent does

- **Console management**

  Arbitrate multi-user access with full, fine-grained timestamped logging and VT-aware buffering, so a console reconnect reconstitutes cleanly.
- **Hardware control**

  Power, next-boot device, BIOS/UEFI/BMC settings, storage controllers (RAID), health checks, telemetry, virtual media, and support data over IPMI, Redfish, and vendor plugins.
- **Network topology**

  Centralized access to MAC address tables and LLDP information across every switch through one interface.
- **Scale &amp; availability**

  Group inheritance and formulaic attribute derivation, plus collective mode to span one confluent interface across servers for HA and large fleets.

## Architecture

Management nodes run the `confluentd` service; clients drive it via CLI, web UI, or REST API. Compute nodes are provisioned over the management network and controlled out-of-band over the BMC network, and collective mode adds scale-out and high availability.

Confluent architecture

See the [architecture overview](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/miscellaneous/architecture/index.md>) for a tour of the components.

## Security by default

Confluent is designed with secure default behaviors and explicit opt-in to reduced security:

- Fully validated TLS protects collective, deployment, and hardware management traffic.
- TPM2 can protect boot volumes and persist node trust across reboots in stateless environments.
- Node authentication options balance convenience against hardening for sensitive data such as the encrypted root password.
- An SSH PKI strategy enables convenient SSH without users curating their own keys or updating `known_hosts`.
- Secure Boot is supported for media and HTTP boot methods.

See [TLS configuration](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/miscellaneous/tlsdesign/index.md>), [SSH design](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/miscellaneous/sshdesign/index.md>), and [OS deployment security](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/miscellaneous/osdeploysecurity/index.md>) for details.

## Ways to drive confluent

- A collection of straightforward Linux commands (`nodepower`, `nodeconsole`, `nodedeploy`, `nodeattrib`, ...).
- A command-line API browser, `confetty`, that works like browsing a filesystem.
- A Python client library.
- A REST API over HTTP.

## Installation paths

There are two suggested approaches:

- **Confluent directly** *(recommended)* — best for most users, especially those without an existing xCAT installation.
- **xCAT and confluent together** — when you rely on an xCAT-exclusive features and want to use it alongside confluent. Start with the xCAT material under [Archive](<https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/archive/xcatconfluentsetup/index.md>).

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