On 27 October 2014 18:52, Nirlay Kundu <[email protected]> wrote:

>  We are looking at overall orchestrating, including automatic hardware
> installation, image download and bootup. We need to support IPv6 in
> addition to IPv4, and discover hardware configuration and capabilities if
> possible. I want to be able to put up any X.86/ARM system, switches and
> routers, turn them up, have them connected directly to the network,
> discover them by management plane, download the appropriate image, have
> them boot up from the downloaded OS and report success back to the network.
> That is, zero-touch hardware bringup. That could be done based on a
>  hardware serial number or some form of identifier to a particular image.
> Would you recommend Cobbler for this kind of operation ?
>
>
>
> What would be the benefit compared to plain PXE boot or Ansible or
> Openstack Ironic/TripleO ?
>
>
>
>
You are light on details, but I would imagine you'd want to have each host
self-catalog in some central data store, then after you have made some
decisions about what to do with a host, you'd have it perform some OS
provisioning before reporting back with credentials and/or being absorbed
into your CM system.

You will also need to wire a lot of this together yourself. Cobbler can
certainly form a part of your solution, but you should read up on what
Cobbler is and isn't. If you're looking to perform automated installs of
specific distributions then it could be a good fit. Another component you
might want to look at is Collins (http://tumblr.github.io/collins/).

For auto-cataloging by serial number; unless you have some reliable out of
band mechanism for obtaining this information, you'll have to netboot a
micro-distro of some sort to inspect the host hardware and post back to a
central API. Collins has a specific API endpoint for achieving this, though
you will presently need to build the aforementioned micro-distro yourself.
I've found Debirf (http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net/wiki/debirf) to be useful
in this respect.
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