Rainer Duffner wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb: > >> Hello, >> >> >> Is it possible to use cobbler to deploy filesystem/partition/disk >> images, e.g. images made from g4l or clonezilla. I'd like to use the >> cobbler as the single server for deploying images via pxe boot. With >> images I'll also have to deal with drivers of different geometries but >> clonezilla has code to do that. Is using such images faster than >> deploying via kickstart for a large number of machines (hundreds). >> >> > > For hundrets of machines, using kickstart (and maybe a load-balanced > farm of distribution-servers) will beat clonezilla hands down. > In fact, I'd say that cobbler was _designed_ for such massive rollouts. > I'd use machines with 8 or more GB RAM, so that the whole distribution > would fit into RAM after it has been served the first time. > I don't know about multicasting - has anybody done multicasting (the > "real" ghost can do that) on such a large scale? I imagine that you run > out of switch-backplane bandwidth at some point. > > > Rainer > _______________________________________________ > cobbler mailing list > [email protected] > https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler >
Indeed. You don't want to be using cloner tools whenever you can avoid it because -- (A) it's really not all that much faster, and (B) can cause tremendous problems when you want to reproduce a build configuration that is /slightly/ different or figure out what you have actually cloned. Going through kickstart, or kickstart + a configuration management system (like Puppet) ensures that you have your configuration written down in terms of easily reproducible rules that allow you to move between different distributions, different hardware, and make adjustments. Images are a last resort. That all being said, Andrew Brown was working on adding some image based cloning tools for use with Cobbler powered by Live CD tech -- for cases were supporting cloning is required (say, you have a handful of Windows machines that you have not virtualized yet). https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/PhysicalSystemCloneFeature -- this can be useful if you have one or two machines that you simply /must/ copy this way and want something simple -- but is not something I would ever recommend as standard practice. Ideally you would run these machines as virtual guests, where it becomes much simpler ... https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/AllAboutImages ... this page describes how Cobbler can track a library of ISO's stored on NFS and kick off virtual installations from those ISO's. In the case of Windows (really the only reason I think you'd want to do this), this would be a sysprep-like modified ISO that was modified to start a fully automated installation. For multicast cloning, what you are thinking of is udpcast -- though building the target images for udpcast that support all possible target NICs is an annoyance. I have not personally tried it in such scales, I have heard that it is somewhat abusive on the network. If someone wants to persue a good way to integrate it into Cobbler, I'm still willing to consider it, though I think the best strategy is to run non-Linux operating systems fully virtualizated and deal with them that way (where image management is MUCH easier) and for the Linux hosts and guests to use kickstart as much as possible -- or in the case of non-kickstart based operating systems, AutoYast, preseed, or what have you -- all of which Cobbler can deal with. --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
