Foreman Discovery is the Foreman project's solution to Metal as a Service. It can discover, register, and provision bare metal systems without knowing anything about them beforehand. Now, with the latest version of Discovery, you're able to boot hosts using the Discovery image directly instead of relying on DHCP and PXE, by mounting the ISO or burning to a CD-ROM or USB stick. In this talk, we'll do a quick introduction to Discovery, before going on to cover the new PXEless features.

1. PXEless Discovery
with Foreman
Stephen Benjamin - February 1, 2016
stephen@redhat.com / @stbenjam

2. Standard Provisioning
● If a cloud or virtual provider, Foreman can
create the host for you
● Bare metal requires more step like gathering
MAC addresses
● Painful for more than a small number of hosts

3. Discovery
● Offers MaaS - “Metal as a Service”
● Unknown hosts boot via DHCP/PXE
– Joins the pool of discovered hosts in Foreman
– Can then provision following normal workflows

4. Workflows
1)Click 'Provision' on a discovered host
– Fill out host form
2)Automatic with discovery rules
– Provision as few as NO clicks
– Based on host facts -
● Memory, mac address, subnet, etc.

5. PXE Discovery Demo

6. What if you don't have PXE?
● The realities of corporate environments is
PXE/DHCP:
– may not be allowed
– may be in use for other systems (e.g. Windows)
– may not want to build infra needed for pxe/dhcp
– etc
● What if we could use Discovery without PXE?

7. PXEless Discovery
● ISO image
– Burn onto physical media
● USB stick, DVD, CD, etc
– Mount via Virtual Media

8. PXEless Discovery
● When image boots, configure settings by menu
or kernel cmdline options
– Networking (DHCP or manual)
– Foreman URL
● Host is discovered like any other
● When provisioned, kexec loads new kernel and
boots the distro's installer (e.g. Anaconda)

9. kexec is magic!
● Requires a kexec template for the operating
system
– Currently RHEL/CentOS/etc supported
● Loads a new kernel WITHOUT rebooting
● We pass network settings + provisioning info on
kernel cmdline

10. Custom Facts
● PXEless UI allows setting custom facts
– Let datacenter operators provision hosts without
giving them access to the Foreman
– e.g. set a custom fact “type” with value “db” and the
host would auto provision as a DB server
– Poor man's authentication scheme via tokens

11. PXEless Demo

12. Image Remastering
● Spin your own PXEless ISO
● Set some default values, no need to enter
everything manually
– sudo discovery-remaster fdi-bootable-3.0.5.iso
"fdi.pxgw=192.168.100.1 fdi.pxdns=192.168.100.1
proxy.url=https://192.168.100.1:8443 proxy.type=proxy"

13. Thanks!
● Docs:
– http://theforeman.org/plugins/foreman_discovery/