On 04/08/2011 20:54, Wojtak, Greg wrote:
I'm hoping someone can help me out just with understanding a couple
things with bare metal provisioning.
Our provisioning set up is such that we have a VLAN/subnet dedicated
to provisioning. We are using a PXE set up. The new server powers
on, gets an address via DHCP from the server and is then forwarded to
the spacewalk server, where the PXE menu is displayed.
I guess the part that's confusing me is this: even though we are
using DHCP for the initial OS load, we assign all of our servers
static IP addresses and host names in DNS. We've got the kickstart
'network' directive set to use DHCP for now so we can get an IP
address assigned on boot after the OS is installed. After this is
complete, we will move the host into it's new VLAN after changing
it's networking information.
I'm trying to figure out if there is a more dynamic way of doing this
other than duplicating a kickstart profile for every single bare
metal host we provision (ie, each profile would be identical with the
exception of the network directive, which would have the appropriate
hostname and ip address configured).
At a bare minimum, I'd like to at least be able to tell the new
server what it's hostname is going to be so that when it registers
with spacewalk it doesn't show up as 'unknown' as the host name.
Thanks in advance!
We turn on Cobbler's DHCP and DNS management features and create a
system record in Cobbler for each system we provision, providing a MAC,
IP, hostname and (Spacewalk) profile, and enable netbooting.
We use one profile for each type of OS we deploy (CentOS server, Fedora
Desktop or Server etc).
Systems then get booted from the network, install, and activate
themselves with Spacewalk. As part of that, the Cobbler netbooting flag
gets unset (its automagic and default) so even if systems have their
primary boot device as the nic, they still boot form local disk.
Puppet is used for more detailed server class configuration. We're
experimenting with the auto-signing of client certs within Puppet too,
to remove that manual step; eventually you'll only need to 'cobbler
system add ... && cobbler sync' to go from bare metal to fully
configured server without human intervention.
We don't bother with a separate VLAN as such, but we do have a dedicated
management LAN we use for deployments.
Note that Cobbler can have more than one nic so as long as all your
networks forward DHCP to the Cobbler/Spacewalk server, servers will get
the right addresses on their interfaces.
The only thing we don't do, which you'd have to script, is to apply the
DHCP address configuration as static on each server, if you wanted to
remove that element.
Mark.
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