[et-mgmt-tools] Provisioning VMs on VMware ESX Server

[drew einhorn]

Hi,

I'm using cobbler on an ESX 3.01 Server.  Koan does not at this time
support creating VMs with the desired config on this platform.

I have not yet dug into:


http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid99_gci1243494,00.html

and attempted to write a script that creates a VM configured the way I
need it.  A friend took a brief look at it, and thought this was for an
older vintage of ESX, so there may be problems getting things to
work on 3.01.

In the meantime, I am creating VMs by hand using VMware's
Virtual Infrastructure Client, powering them up, and PXE boot
takes me to the Menu where I choose a profile and an appropriate
VM gets built.

The problem with this approach is that so far is dealing with
MAC address.  If VMware allocates the MAC address, I won't
know what it is till after the VM is created.  Then I have to
dig around on the ESX server to find out what MAC was assigned
and manually issue a cobbler system command, or I can manually
assign a MAC address and force VMware to use it, then manually
issue the system command.  But that's even more tedious.

In the recent Kickstart Tips and Tricks document I found a way
to get kickstart to statically assign the ip address it got
from pxe via dhcp using %pre.

I've got most of the embellisment to this tip necessary to issue
a cobbler system command to pin the ip to the mac address.

I need a way to easily find the name of the currently running
profile to use in the --profile option.  Fortunately I can get away
with hardcoding the profile name in the kickstart, but sooner or
later I will add another profile that uses the same kickstart and
this work around will break down.

Thanks,
-- 
Drew Einhorn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/attachments/20070710/81dba270/attachment.htm>