Jasper Capel wrote: > 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 >
Excellent summary. Yes, if this is the odd one out and you have to run koan /from/ the ESX server in this case that's acceptable. Or we could just add parameters to koan to supply those parameters to allow that to run from koan. Perhaps: koan --vc-user=X --vc-pass=Y --server=cobbler.example.org --profile=foo Yes, in general Cobbler right now creates MACs in a random range owned by Xen. Moving forward, we want it to create MACs based on it's virt type, as VMware server/workstation at least are picky (KVM not so much, but it still should be correct). This can be done by fixing up the mac generator in Cobbler, I'm sure. (Some of this may also be duplicated in koan, I can't recall at the moment). The main thing is that the RAM info and disk info would come from cobbler, and of course cobbler is managing the PXE operation as well. (This is actually how the VMware support for the other types -- server and workstation in koan work now, but it requires that you manually assign the mac versus getting a random one if not supplied. Definitely something we should fix). --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
