> 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
My use case is 8000-10000 nodes per datacenter and I need to get them up in less than 30 minutes. These nodes use gigabit interfaces. I need to have a centralized point to get state information for the management software so I like the idea of using a single PXE server for boot/dhcp and mirror the packages on other systems/subnets for load balancing. For now I'll use kickstart and see if there are any problems. Thanks. _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
