Best Cluster Management Software for CentOS

xCAT, or Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit, is a versatile open-source solution aimed at streamlining the deployment, scaling, and oversight of both bare metal servers and virtual machines. It delivers extensive management functionalities tailored for environments such as high-performance computing clusters, render farms, grids, web farms, online gaming infrastructures, cloud setups, and data centers. Built on a foundation of established system administration practices, xCAT offers a flexible framework that allows system administrators to identify hardware servers, perform remote management tasks, deploy operating systems on physical or virtual machines in both disk and diskless configurations, set up and manage user applications, and execute parallel system management operations. This toolkit is compatible with a range of operating systems, including Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, and CentOS, as well as architectures such as ppc64le, x86_64, and ppc64. Moreover, it supports various management protocols, including IPMI, HMC, FSP, and OpenBMC, which enable seamless remote console access. In addition to its core functionalities, xCAT's extensible nature allows for ongoing enhancements and adaptations to meet the evolving needs of modern IT infrastructures.

Rocks is an open-source Linux distribution designed for building computational clusters, grid endpoints, and visualization tiled-display walls with ease for end users. Since its inception in May 2000, the Rocks team has worked to simplify the deployment and management of clusters, focusing on making them easy to deploy, manage, upgrade, and scale effectively. The most recent version, Rocks 7.0, also known as Manzanita, is exclusively a 64-bit release based on CentOS 7.4, incorporating all updates as of December 1, 2017. This distribution comes with a variety of tools, including the Message Passing Interface (MPI), which are essential for converting a collection of computers into a functional cluster. Users can customize their installations by incorporating additional software packages during the installation process using specially provided CDs. Moreover, recent security vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown impact nearly all hardware, and appropriate mitigations are implemented through operating system updates to enhance security. As a result, Rocks not only facilitates the creation of clusters but also ensures that they remain secure and up-to-date with the latest patches and enhancements.

CIQ empowers people to do amazing things by providing innovative and stable software infrastructure solutions for all computing needs. From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing, and cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack to drive solutions for customers and communities with stable, scalable, secure production environments. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack.