Hi all, Following up on a IRC-discussion, let's add ESX support to Koan. If we manage to do this, I think we support all major x86(_64) virtualization platforms. :)
I invited an ESX-savvy friend to the ML, so I'll briefly explain what Koan does first: Koan is a sister-utility to Cobbler, see it as a client side tool that can access information stored in Cobbler to kick off installations (koan stands for Kickstart-over-a-network). Using koan, we can deploy new virtuals for xen/kvm (do we do vmware server/workstation yet?), or reinstall a system from within that system. If I wanted a new virtual on my EL5 xen-box, I'd type something like koan --server=10.1.4.157 --virt --virt-type=xen --nogfx --system=testvirtual.moo.local So we'd want to add a new virt-type. I'm not sure if we're able to run Koan on the ESX-machine (or if we even want to), so we might want to invoke the operation remotely. VMware may have some tools to pull this off, but I lack the technical knowledge on how this works. So what I think it needs to do is: 1) Connect to the ESX-server or VirtualCenter-server using provided credentials 2) Create a new VM according to specifications from Cobbler 3) Launch the VM, it will (hopefully) PXE-boot (we need to set the VM's MAC address for this) and the installation will be initiated. We also might need to teach Cobbler to generate MAC-addresses in the ESX-range. Thoughts? Jasper _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
