Chris Sarginson wrote:
Hi Guys,
I'm looking for a quick definitive answer regarding the cobbler system
add command:
Basically I will be installing VM's, and they are frequently going to
have different RAM/disk size etc, so rather than creating an *insane*
amount of profiles for each distro + each possible virt config, I was
wondering if I could specify it on a system by system basis?
Has anyone else tried/required this?
I'm currently running on Fedora 7, and am just using yum provided
cobbler/koan.
The idea is that a profile should represent what the system does and
is... the kickstart file, the RAM requirements, the disk requirements,
and so forth -- to keep all of those things together to make a
configuration like "virtual-webserver" completely reproducible and
consistant. In the end, that might even make there be less to
configure, as you wouldn't need to create the per-system records. An
example of this is a development or test environment -- that profile
might be rolled out an arbitrary number of times, and you wouldn't
neccessarily want to require a cobbler record for every instance of that
environment. You'd just use koan with "--virt" and
"--profile=development-environ". Now, in an environment where you need
DHCP reservations, then yes, you'd want the per-system records.
How many profiles is insane, by the way? :) One thing that we have in
Cobbler that is intended to help make this more manageable are the
concept of inherited profiles.
The idea is that you could do:
cobbler profile add --name=webserver-base .... --distro=blah
cobbler profile add --name=webserver-base-moreram --virt-ram=1024
--inherit=webserver-base
So, if you want to modify the profile "webserver-base" it would make
changes to all of the subprofiles for you. That may help.
koan does offer some local overrides, --virt-name, --virt-disk,
--virt-bridge ... though we try to keep those minimal since it's
supposed to be a central management way
of doing things. Those are there for those folks who want to take
advantage of a cobbler server outside of their normal working
environment -- for instance, a standalone
box outside of a datacenter needs to install a cobbler profile, but the
default image location does not suit the environment, etc.
Anyhow, let me know if the inherited profiles might work for you ... if
not, we can think about whether per-system overrides of everything in
the profile object
is a good idea or not. I'm willing to remove those restrictions if
enough folks find them valuable, though I still think profiles (and
sub-profiles) are a very meaningful
abstraction. For Web UI uses, we may even leave those overrides under
an "advanced" tab or something of the like, to still encourage creation
of task-specific
profiles.
Thoughts?
--Michael
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