seth vidal wrote: > On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 16:21 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> I would love to use kickstart but my peers are directing me to use >> images. The perception is that images would deploy faster than >> kickstart. Has anyone on this list done any performance measurements of >> images verses kickstart or just kickstart performance. For example there >> is an old paper documenting system imager installing 1000 nodes in 15 >> minutes. I do not have the hardware yet to test performance but I may be >> forced to use this method unless I can get numbers to back up my >> decision. >> >> http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/BitTorrent#Benchmark >> >> > > I think it really depends on your use case. > > For example. If you're imaging 1000 identical nodes all at once it is > quite possible that a torrent-based imager will be faster. > > However, I'm willing to wager a lot of people here are not imaging 1000 > nodes all at once. They're install 5, 10, 15 servers at a time and want > a consistent and repeatable install process that allows some variability > w/o having to break your back to provide it. > > Hence, kickstart wins, hands down. >
Indeed. I know of one particular installation that was installing 200-300 nodes at once and kickstart was still rather zippy (15 minutes or so), without a mirror. Unless you are seeing time problems this way, I'd go the kickstart route, and then if you /are/ seeing time problems then, come back, and there are a few ways to mitigate that. First off, install server mirror setup is especially easy in new cobbler. As an alternative Cobbler also has the "--server-override" parameter so all systems can PXE off of one box and then serve their content from multiple mirrors. This way you can, if you want, explicitly tell certain systems to boot off a different http tree. # establish a mirror on cobblerslave1 cobbler replicate --master=mastercobbler.example.org --full-data-sync # first time only, later use other flags # establish a mirror on cobblerslave2 cobbler replicate --master=mastercobbler.example.org --full-data-sync # first time only, later use other flags # set up a certain cobbler system to use mirror2, regardless of who actually serves it via PXE cobbler system edit --name=foo --server-override=cobblerslave2 I have also seen simpler things done with just a squid cache or mirror of the install tree and some clever things in %pre to decide which "url" line to use in the kickstart. I am fairly convinced that the problems caused by dealing with images (not knowing what's in the image, needing to build it, how do you rebuild it or build it when distributions come around, making it work with differences in hardware that the installer would normally account for) are not worth dealing with in most applications. With kickstart, you get the same advantages that a good configuration management system buys you -- you have a record of how everything got the way it was and you can easily rebuild them and make changes. With images also still transferring the image over the network, and the time spent to evaluate and process the kickstart is probably not that intensive. Also with images it's easy to get in the habit of not updating them properly because they are "golden" which is a euphemism that really should not be used. Especially in Fedora 7 and later (and should be in EL 6 and later), you can attach yum repos in kickstart and make sure you get all of your updates to all of your packages at install time -- no more calling yum in %post. --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
