xCAT

What xCAT is

xCAT is an open-source toolkit for deploying, scaling, and managing bare metal servers and virtual machines. It supports environments such as HPC clusters, render farms, grids, web farms, online gaming infrastructure, clouds, and datacenters. Hardware discovery can use manual definitions, MTMS-based or switch-based methods, or sequential discovery. xCAT provisions operating systems through diskful, stateless, or cloned installations, and supports remote power control, console access, inventory and vitals queries, and event log queries. Administrators can run shell commands, copy files, and ping nodes in parallel. The REST API supports integration with third-party software; documentation also lists OpenStack and SoftLayer integration and configuration for GPFS, Parallel Environment, and LSF. Its distributed architecture is described as able to scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes. Security documentation covers TLS, command access control, auditing, password management, secure zones, and IP-based access control. The download page lists version 2.19.1 as stable. The xCAT Consortium recommends Confluent as a long-term successor and migration path.