Hi Vladimir! On 19.06.13 09:35, Vladimir Ondrus wrote:
Our customer wants to switch to ipv6 setup.
He should consider dual stack operation. Most HPC utilities are not IPv6 ready - think about MPI, job schedulers, parallel filesystems, license servers. And of course PXE. OpenMPI is IPv6 ready, one of the nice exceptions. And I'm able to confirm it works :)
Is there any hardware BIOS which can initiate PXE over ipv6?
No. I was told EFI should be IPv6 aware but I never saw a working installation.
Is there any dhcp server with PXE ipv6 support?
Sure. ISC DHCP is capable of serving IPv6 allocations. But you have to carefully think about a concept of managing your network with (or without) DHCP and SLAAC. As the IP address is bound to a UUID, it will change between reinstallations of nodes and probably also between bootrom and system.
Does pxelinux supports ipv6?
Definitively not. You have to use different tools like Grub2.
I would operate a cluster as I always did. A closed network using
private IPv4 space, optional NAT on the headnode to the world.
Additional IPv6 routing on the headnode, SLAAC addresses internally.
Using some scripting and "ipv6calc" you should be able to feed the local
hosts file or a DNS server with the assigned addresses. Using this
approach you'll have your well known setup internally and the customer
the possibility to access the cluster and its nodes over IPv6. And all
applications will feel comfortable, a big win in the looooooong
transition phase from IPv4 to IPv6.
But even I have running IPv6 at home since April 2005 I didn't found a
customer yet willing to switch from a IPv4 only cluster to IPv6. It will
probably take an additional decade or more until we are able to drop
IPv4. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, people like me have still a
chance for a job ;-)
HTH
Beat
--
\|/ Beat Rubischon