[et-mgmt-tools] Teaching cobbler about images & power

[Al Tobey]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 7:35 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
> These are two things I want to look at doing soon.
>
> (A)
> The image use case:
>
> We're already using Cobbler to help manage DHCP, DNS, PXE trees, and
> abstract out all of the glue that holds the OS's together.  One thing that
> it doesn't do though, is have a good way to deploy images to physical
> machines (cloning).    Kickstart is pretty flexible, I like it better, but I
> know that doesn't solve all the problems of deploying "that other OS" and so
> forth.  Images are also important for the appliance space, and we'll also be
> able to eventually use the same kind of image database for virt images
> depending on how we play our cards.
>
> So, since things like udpcast allow network deployment of the "target" boot
> image, this seems like it would be easy to do something like.
>
>   cobbler system add --name=foo --clone=this-image-target   # syntax
> completely made up at this point

A "nice to have" for this would be that it be modular enough that the
clone functionality could be customized to do NetApp snap clones, LVM
snapshots, and similar.  Obviously, Cobbler won't be able to support
every device and vendor, but I'm sure with the capability there, it'll
get used. I'd say LVM snapshots would be a good place to start, then
qemu qcow2 (not supported by Xen, but is by KVM/Qemu).   Once there's
more than one module, it should be simple enough to add NetApp/HP
EVA/EqualLogic/EMC CX/etc..

-Al