[et-mgmt-tools] PATCH: koan: --no-cobbler --virt

[Gavin Romig-Koch]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
>
> I'm not sure we should add this.   Discussion is welcome.
>
Thanks for the chance to discuss this.  In re-reading this before 
sending it, I realize that it is longer and "preachy-er" than I had 
hoped.  Please forgive my weak writing skills.

Within Red Hat Support we have a need for a single tool that can do 
kickstart based installs, of either actual hardware or virtual 
machines.  For each issue that comes in (that isn't solvable by just 
looking at the case), we need to do some sort of local reproduction of 
the issue, if that's possible.  This happens several times a week, if 
not more, for each engineer working cases within support.  As you know, 
we support three major releases, multiple sub-configurations within 
that, and our customers are often reluctant and sometimes unable to 
upgrade to the latest update within a release without assurances from us 
that it will solve their problem.   All this is my way of emphasizing 
that we can't reduce our set of possible installs to a countable, 
nameable, predefined set of profiles.  Each case is a new profile, and 
often we must tweak that profile several times to find out exactly what 
combination is needed to reproduce the problem.

While reproducablity is important, it is almost never necessary to 
reproduce the customers  exact hardware or virtual machine parameters.  
On the other hand, it is almost always necessary to reproduce (at least 
part of) the software enviroment they have.

It would be possible to use a Cobbler server in this environment.  Each 
engineer could manage his own Cobbler server, or we could create a 
central Cobbler server, and build some tools that allowed engineers to 
check in new profiles/systems, delete profile/systems, and implement 
some nameing convention for profiles.  But this would just be extra work 
to make our environment fit the model of the typical data center 
environment.

It would also be possible to use koan hardware re-installs, and 
virt-install for virt installs, but it seemed useful to me to have a 
single tool (with a single set of options) that did what I see as a 
single function - a kickstart based install.

We could also build such a tool.  We have a tool that does largely the 
same thing as koan --no-cobbler --replace-self does, but does not do 
--virt installs.   I was looking at how to extend it to also do virt 
installs, when I discovered Koan.  At the time I knew that Koan was 
really just an extension of Cobbler, but I was hopeing that Koan was 
willing to grow into a more general kickstart-over-a-network tool, able 
to use Cobbler, but not entirely dependent on it.  I understand any 
reluctance, or objection, to growing the purpose of Koan -- do one 
thing, do it well -- is a good maxim for programs and libraries and 
maybe even people, but I believe Koan can grow outside of it's current 
roll of Cobbler-helper, and still be following this maxim.

While RH's support's needs are perhaps unique in the volume of 
re-installs we do, I don't believe we are unique in our need for a 
single tool to do kickstart based installs of either virtual or actual 
hardware.   Does Koan want to be that tool, to stay within it's current 
role?

                                                                                                                     
-gavin....