[Ovirt-devel] Issue with ISO provisioning

[Hugh O. Brock]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 10:11:01PM -0400, Perry Myers wrote:

[snip]

>
> So Windows installs right now work because the soft reboot in step 3 does 
> not cause the vm to shutdown.  If it did that, the restart of the vm 
> would come up without the ISO in the drive (since that is a temporary 
> association)
>
> We've talked in the past about changing domains so that on reboot the vm  
> is destroyed and then restarted by taskomatic.  This way the boot device  
> can be toggled between reboots.  This fixes linux PXE provisioning, which 
> right now has a problem because after OS installation over PXE boot the  
> domain soft reboots and tries to PXE again.
>
> So it seems the requirements for Windows and Linux provisioning are  
> somewhat at odds.  What we may have to do is make it so taskomatic is  
> aware of the OS type and sets up the semantics of domain rebooting  
> accordingly.

Yes, this is exactly the same song-and-dance we went through with
python-virtinst when getting Windows installs to work from
virt-manager. What we need to do is figure out a good abstraction for
the various possible install modes and either a. allow the user to
specify what's desired, or preferably b. figure it out ourselves.

What we want is some way to say "OK, the install is finished, now
change the VM to boot in the proper permanent configuration." If we
always set VMs to halt on reboot and we have a way for taskomatic to
detect that a VM has halted in mid-install, we could have the UI pop
up a message asking the user if the install finished? It would be
difficult to make that clear but it could work, I think...

Thoughts?

(BTW great news that we can even do this at all)

--Hugh