Hi Scott, I'll jump on your bandwagon but then again you already know I perfer Kickstarting over cloning you should also mention that unless you have Flashcopy for your DASD Kickstarting is actually faster than cloning. unless your clone master is very small.
as you recall ours was on a mod3 (lots of required garbage) and cloning that mod3 was slower than kickstarting also after the kickstart was done the server was ready, no additional steps to change IP's or anything. if only redhat would fix that re-ipl after the reboot. they say it's an IBM issue not thiers Doug Carroll ----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Rohling" <scott.rohl...@gmail.com> To: <LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:00 AM Subject: To kick or to clone ... that is the question
This is a blatant request for discussion about the pros and cons of using an automated installation (e.g. RH kickstart - Suse autoyast (though maybe this has changed - I'm not current on Suse) - vs cloning a system from a 'golden image'... and I should say: on zSeries. I'm a fan of kickstart - and I'll list my reasons in approximate order of importantance to me (most to least): - kickstart forces a scripted and recreatable installation. You specify the rpm's and can do some limited scripting within the kickstart file itself to end up with (hopefully) a working Linux system that requires no manual tweaking (at least - if you do it 'right'). The alternative is a cloned system that the Linux SA's have been on, and perhaps several other teams - all performing manual tasks to end up with the final product - all sorts of shoeprints and no good detectives. Whereas a kickstart config is self-documenting - a clone is not. With good scripting and good use of rpm packaging for your 'local' or even 'vendor' products - you can end up with a very KISS config file that might even go multiplatform. (e.g. arch=`uname -m` ) - with a proper building of conf and parm files on z/VM - a guest can be kicked already configured with a working network -- no need for some outside scripting or manual config. - you can have different kickstart files for different server 'types' (web, app, db, etc) - these can even be built dynamically and requested via a URL to to the kickstart ( e.g. http://mykicker/kick.web&ip=xx.xx.xx.xx+etc+etc.....) - The size of the DASD can be flexible.. cloning requires copying the same size DASD as the source.. - The latest fixes can be applied by keeping the repository the kickstart uses current - rather than updating a clone source. (of course - testing is still required and would require kickstarting a guest to truly do any testing - a good thing imo) - It encourages packing by rpm rather than manual 'tarball' methods.. this is in line with a 'recreatable' install. Yes, you can still do 'tar' commands in the kickstart file itself.. but specifying an rpm package is oh so much easier. - Servers start 'clean' - ie no old log files from the clone source and no need to try and script a 'cleanup' - No worrying about whether a clone source is 'up' when a new server is clone and possibly clone a live system There are downsides.. but I'll leave those to the rest of you to expound on, since I'm taking a position of 'kickstart good, Jane' Thanks and hope this is valuable to some .. Scott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
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