Active Engine Guide¶
Active engine is used as initial configuration and management tool during deployed machine startup. Currently z/VM driver use xcatconf4z and cloud-init as 2 stage active engine.
Installation and Configuration of xcatconf4z¶
xCAT supports initiating changes to a Linux on z Systems virtual machine while Linux is shut down or the virtual machine is logged off. The changes to Linux are implemented using an activation engine (AE) that is run when Linux is booted the next time. The xCAT activation engine, xcatconf4z, handles changes initiated by xCAT. The script/service must be installed in the Linux on z Systems virtual server so it can process change request files transmitted by the xCAT ZHCP service to the reader of the virtual machine as a class X file. The script is xcatconf4z and is located at /opt/xcat/share/xcat/scripts in the xCAT MN machine.
The xcatconf4z script should be installed in a machine that can be managed while it is logged off. This includes a Linux on z Systems that will be captured for netboot or sysclone deploys.
Note
An additional activation engine, cloud-init, should be installed to handle OpenStack related tailoring of the system. The cloud-init AE relies on tailoring performed by the xCAT AE, xcatconf4z.
Installation and Configuration of cloud-init¶
OpenStack uses cloud-init as its activation engine. Some distributions include cloud-init either already installed or available to be installed. If your distribution does not include cloud-init, you can download the code from https://launchpad.net/cloud-init/+download. After installation, if you issue the following shell command and no errors occur, cloud-init is installed correctly:
cloud-init init --local
Installation and configuration of cloud-init differs among different Linux distributions, and cloud-init source code may change. This section provides general information, but you may have to tailor cloud-init to meet the needs of your Linux distribution. You can find a community-maintained list of dependencies at http://ibm.biz/cloudinitLoZ.
The z/VM OpenStack support has been tested with cloud-init 0.7.4 and 0.7.5 for RHEL6.x and SLES11.x, 0.7.6 for RHEL7.x and SLES12.x, and 0.7.8 for Ubuntu 16.04. If you are using a different version of cloud-init, you should change your specification of the indicated commands accordingly.
During cloud-init installation, some dependency packages may be required. You can use zypper and python setuptools to easily resolve these dependencies. See https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools for more information.