When restarting a bunch of different nodes with different hardware types that take different amounts of time to shut down down and boot up, it’s nice to be able to send a “reset” command to all of them, as with the “rpower reset” command from xCAT.
With only the “power off” and “power on” commands available, we have to do “power off” and then wait around as various nodes shut down before doing “power on”. If we want them to come back up as quickly as possible, we have to babysit the process and keep track of which ones are on because they’re still shutting down and which ones are on because we’ve already turned them back on.
Being able to send a reset command (and/or a soft reboot command) would allow us to push the button and then walk away.
Thanks.