[Fedora-xen] [ANN] Cobbler 0.3.0 / Xen provisioning / call for feedback

[Michael DeHaan]

A while ago I announced cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) on 
kickstart-list, and one of the users there asked why they never heard 
about it on any of the Xen lists... so, here goes this email...

Cobbler is a provisioning tool designed to abstract the differences 
between PXE, Xen, and "running Linux box" provisioning.   It does this 
by using a helper tool called "koan" to do the Xen and "existing OS" 
bits.      It's intended to be used either as an application or as a 
library/application (note: GPL) underneath a larger app.

What's potentially interesting here is you can have a fedora tree, 
mirror it, and get Xen provisioning set up off of it rather quickly.

Example:

on "boot server"
# cobbler --import --mirror=rsync://mirror.example.com/fedora-linux-core 
--mirror-name=fedora-linux-core
# (potentially edit xen parameters in /var/lib/cobbler/profiles or 
define new profiles)
# cobbler sync

on "target machine"
# koan --xen --profile=<name-of-profile> --server=bootserver.example.com

What profiles do is they associate the distribution (the initrd and the 
kickstart plus metadata) with xen parameters (things like filesize 
required, RAM required, etc) and make it very easy to reproduce and 
automatically install the same virtual machine install multiple times.   
At a minimum level, this means kickstarting Xen and not needing to 
remember the correct parameters to use for xenguest-install each time.   
There is the added bonus of the PXE+re-provisioning features for bare 
metal, but they really don't apply to the fedora-xen list.

(Disclaimer:   Koan should be using the xeninst-devel package for 
installing Xen.   But it's not.  This is currently because it tries to 
play nice with distributions that don't have that package.   This needs 
to change soon.  Until then, the install code is heavily based on older 
versions of xenguest-install, but it works, and I just did an install of 
FC-6 GOLD recently.)

One feature that definitely needs to be added (and is in the works) is 
to do the install of the remote Xen image from the boot server, without 
having to log on to the remote bare metal machine that is running the 
dom0.   Cobbler can already do this for bare metal using:  "cobbler 
enchant --profile=<profile_name> 
--address=<address_of_machine_to_reinstall>"

Anyhow, check out the website and the app if interested, and if you have 
any feedback/thoughts, I'd love to hear it.   There's a mailing list set 
up (https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools), and cobbler 
and koan are already in FC-5 and FC-6.    The newer versions are waiting 
on the push, so if you're really wanting to get at them, I'd recommend 
building from source from the mercurial repository.

Michael DeHaan