New Features

The following sections describe the new features and enhancements introduced in the Omnia 2.0.0.0 release.

Support for Podman Containers

Enables deployment of the following Omnia core services as Podman containers, ensuring secure, lightweight, and OCI-compliant environments for HPC clusters. This simplifies lifecycle management, accelerates updates, and improves isolation for critical services:

  • Omnia Core — Orchestrates HPC cluster operations.

  • Omnia Auth — Provides LDAP-based authentication.

  • OpenCHAMI — Powers diskless provisioning workflows.

  • Pulp Repository Service — Hosts local repositories for air-gapped deployments.

Repository Management

Provides a Pulp-based local repository service deployed as a Podman container, enabling secure and efficient package distribution in air-gapped HPC environments. This reduces dependency on external networks and accelerates provisioning workflows.

Authentication Service

Integrates an LDAP server within the Omnia Auth Podman container for centralized authentication and directory services. This enhances security and simplifies identity management across HPC clusters.

Telemetry Collection and Monitoring

Automates the configuration of Kubernetes Service Clusters to host essential monitoring components for telemetry collection and monitoring. The following telemetry capabilities are supported:

  • iDRAC Telemetry — Collects out-of-band system metrics, including power, thermal, and hardware health data, from Dell servers. Telemetry data is streamed as time-series data to Kafka or VictoriaMetrics, depending on deployment requirements. VictoriaPump is included for storing telemetry metrics in the VictoriaMetrics database.

  • LDMS Telemetry — Captures in-band performance metrics such as CPU, memory, network, and I/O usage from Slurm cluster nodes. Metrics are streamed as time-series data to Kafka for scalable ingestion and analysis.

  • Air-gapped telemetry support — Supports telemetry collection in air-gapped or offline environments to meet security and compliance requirements.

Kubernetes Cluster High Availability

Delivers built-in high-availability (HA) failover for Service Kubernetes Cluster control plane nodes, ensuring uninterrupted cluster management and improved resilience for HPC workloads.

Provisioning and Deployment Based on Functional Groups

Enables role-based provisioning for HPC clusters using mapping files. Automatically assigns functional roles (for example, Slurm Control Node and Login Node) and deploys customized operating system images tailored to workload-specific configurations.

The following functional roles are supported:

  • Login Node

  • Login Compiler Node

  • Slurm Node

  • Slurm Control Node

  • Service Kubernetes Node

  • Service Kubernetes Control Plane

Stateless Boot

Introduces stateless provisioning for RHEL 10 using OpenCHAMI, reducing deployment time and storage overhead for HPC clusters.

Automatic CUDA Installation for GPU Workloads

Automatically installs CUDA during node provisioning, ensuring GPU-enabled nodes are ready for HPC workloads immediately after deployment. This reduces manual setup time and accelerates readiness for GPU-intensive applications.

Security Enhancements

Credentials are now encrypted using industry-standard algorithms (for example, AES-256), improving compliance with security best practices and reducing the risk of data exposure.

Platform Support

Supports x86_64 and aarch64 architectures, enabling deployment on both traditional and ARM-based HPC nodes for improved flexibility and energy efficiency.

Input Template and Validator

Provides predefined configuration templates and early input validation to reduce configuration errors and accelerate HPC cluster provisioning. This improves deployment reliability and overall user experience.

If you have any feedback about Omnia documentation, please reach out at omnia.readme@dell.com.