Windows deployment is pain, sure enough, especially in a mixed Windows/Linux environment.
I've been thinking about how to solve this for some time, with a good part of it posted to this list. Ultimately, we have to draw the line somewhere as Cobbler doesn't really want to know a lot about Windows internals, but it should still be easy to use. I think my proposal is thus: We make it easy to host and mass-deploy Windows on VT hardware, but we make the installer do just a little bit of legwork. Generally this seems to involve cracking open an ISO and inserting a unattended.txt file in the "i386" (or other) subdirectory. Google "unattended.txt" for info. I have yet to try this, though I figure someone who has could confirm this is sufficient. Then, all that will be required is... cp windows_modified.iso /mnt/some_nfs_share/foo/windows.iso cobbler image add --name=windows --file=nfs://server/../foo/windows.iso And on the client to install it: koan --virt --image=windows --virt-type=qemu --server=cobbler.example.org And that will kick off the install. The only catch is unattended.txt is up to the admin, but I think that is a reasonable comprimise. Thoughts? I need to check if we can also do this with Xen Fullvirt if that supports ISO based installs -- previously we only supported Xen FV via PXE based installs. So yes, you will need VT hardware for this, but this could be a nice tool in fully virtualizing Windows infrastructure on Linux, and minimizing it. VT hardware is also becoming a lot more common place, so this seems reasonable. If you don't have VT hardware, this does work with qemu, just rather slowly (and too slow for most production use). Comments welcome. The code for all of this is on the devel branch of cobbler and koan now. (NOTE: I believe Windows has some restrictions about what is legal to run virtualized or not -- please read up on this and use the appropriate Windows versions that allow this). --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
