Cobbler Summit - Automated Xen VM Deployment

Provisioning With Cobbler Michael DeHaan 2007

Common Provisioning Goals Fully Automated Installs PXE Reinstalls (w/o PXE) Virtualization

Existing Solutions Are (Usually) ... Non-comprehensive Bought ($$$) or Custom-Built ($$$) Limited In Scope

Cobbler Is... Simple / Unified Open / Sharable Feature-Rich

Cobbler In Action....

Importing A DVD cobbler check (and edit /var/lib/cobbler/settings) cobbler import --mirror=/media/dvd --name=FC-7

Behind The Scenes Input /usr/bin/cobbler -> /var/lib/cobbler/* Output /tftpboot/* /var/www/cobbler/* /etc/dhcp.conf

Configuration Concepts

Manual Configurations cobbler distro add cobbler profile add cobbler system add

Viewing The Configuration cobbler list cobbler report

PXE Setup manage_dhcp = 1 in /var/lib/cobbler/settings & “cobbler sync” ... (or just set your next-server entry)

PXE Menus Type “menu” Pick a profile Default = local boot

Introducing koan koan --list-profiles --server=bootserv.example.com

koan & reinstallation koan --profile=FC6-x86_64-webserver --replace-self --server=bootserv.example.com

koan & virtualization koan --virt --profile=virtual-testbed --server=bootserv.example.com

Advanced Features ...

Kernel Options /var/lib/cobbler/settings --kopts

Kickstart Templating examples in /etc/cobbler cobbler system add --ksmeta=”foo=2 bar=8” “$foo $bar” http://cheetahtemplate.org/learn.html

PXE Templating /etc/cobbler ... dhcp.template pxedefault.template pxeprofile.template pxesystem.template

Repository Mirroring cobbler repo add --name=fc6i386updates --mirror=http://... cobbler profile add ... --repos=”fc6i386updates fc6i386extras”

Kickstart Tracking /var/log/cobbler ... File Requests Syslog “cobbler status”

Remote Control cobbler enchant --address=192.168.1.100 --profile=FC-7-foo --virt=yes

Summary Unified Provisioning Environment Easy to Use Feature Rich Free / Open / Sharable

Useful Links http://cobbler.et.redhat.com git clone git://et.redhat.com/cobbler git clone git://et.redhat.com/koan [email_address] [email_address]

by Abhishek Singh