A while ago I announced cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) on
kickstart-list, and one of the users there asked why they never heard
about it on any of the Xen lists... so, here goes this email...
Cobbler is a provisioning tool designed to abstract the differences
between PXE, Xen, and "running Linux box" provisioning. It does this
by using a helper tool called "koan" to do the Xen and "existing OS"
bits. It's intended to be used either as an application or as a
library/application (note: GPL) underneath a larger app.
What's potentially interesting here is you can have a fedora tree,
mirror it, and get Xen provisioning set up off of it rather quickly.
Example:
on "boot server"
# cobbler --import --mirror=rsync://mirror.example.com/fedora-linux-core
--mirror-name=fedora-linux-core
# (potentially edit xen parameters in /var/lib/cobbler/profiles or
define new profiles)
# cobbler sync
on "target machine"
# koan --xen --profile=<name-of-profile> --server=bootserver.example.com
What profiles do is they associate the distribution (the initrd and the
kickstart plus metadata) with xen parameters (things like filesize
required, RAM required, etc) and make it very easy to reproduce and
automatically install the same virtual machine install multiple times.
At a minimum level, this means kickstarting Xen and not needing to
remember the correct parameters to use for xenguest-install each time.
There is the added bonus of the PXE+re-provisioning features for bare
metal, but they really don't apply to the fedora-xen list.
(Disclaimer: Koan should be using the xeninst-devel package for
installing Xen. But it's not. This is currently because it tries to
play nice with distributions that don't have that package. This needs
to change soon. Until then, the install code is heavily based on older
versions of xenguest-install, but it works, and I just did an install of
FC-6 GOLD recently.)
One feature that definitely needs to be added (and is in the works) is
to do the install of the remote Xen image from the boot server, without
having to log on to the remote bare metal machine that is running the
dom0. Cobbler can already do this for bare metal using: "cobbler
enchant --profile=<profile_name>
--address=<address_of_machine_to_reinstall>"
Anyhow, check out the website and the app if interested, and if you have
any feedback/thoughts, I'd love to hear it. There's a mailing list set
up (https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools), and cobbler
and koan are already in FC-5 and FC-6. The newer versions are waiting
on the push, so if you're really wanting to get at them, I'd recommend
building from source from the mercurial repository.
Michael DeHaan
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