Admin Guide
===========

When reading this chapter, assume you have read the :doc:`Overview of xCAT <../../overview/index>` to understand the architecture and features of xCAT, and have read the :doc:`xCAT Install Guide <../install-guides/index>` to have an xCAT Management Node installed.

Now you can start to learn how to manage a cluster by xCAT. This chapter includes following major sections:

* **Basic Concepts**

  This Section will give you the introduction of some basic concepts in xCAT like the **Object Concept**, **Database**, **Global Configuration**, **Network** and **Node Type**.

* **Manage Cluster**

  This is the a major part of xCAT doc. It describes the procedures of how to manage a real cluster. Since the management procedures are different among the hardware type, this section is organized base on the hardware type.

* **Reference**

  This section includes the brief introduction of xCAT commands, the man page of each command and the definition of each xCAT Database table.

* **Large Cluster**

  This section gives some advanced topics of how to manage a large cluster. **Large Cluster** means a cluster which has more than 500 compute nodes.

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   basic_concepts/index.rst
   manage_clusters/index.rst
   references/index.rst
   large_clusters/index.rst