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[ANN] Cobbler 0.3.0 / Xen provisioning / call for feedback: msg#00097

Subject: [ANN] Cobbler 0.3.0 / Xen provisioning / call for feedback
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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