Rainer Duffner wrote:
khan_don(a)emc.com schrieb:
> Hello,
>
>
> Is it possible to use cobbler to deploy filesystem/partition/disk
> images, e.g. images made from g4l or clonezilla. I'd like to use the
> cobbler as the single server for deploying images via pxe boot. With
> images I'll also have to deal with drivers of different geometries but
> clonezilla has code to do that. Is using such images faster than
> deploying via kickstart for a large number of machines (hundreds).
>
>
For hundrets of machines, using kickstart (and maybe a load-balanced
farm of distribution-servers) will beat clonezilla hands down.
In fact, I'd say that cobbler was _designed_ for such massive rollouts.
I'd use machines with 8 or more GB RAM, so that the whole distribution
would fit into RAM after it has been served the first time.
I don't know about multicasting - has anybody done multicasting (the
"real" ghost can do that) on such a large scale? I imagine that you run
out of switch-backplane bandwidth at some point.
Rainer
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Indeed. You don't want to be using cloner tools whenever you can avoid
it because -- (A) it's really not all that much faster, and (B) can
cause tremendous problems when you want to reproduce a build
configuration that is /slightly/ different or figure out what you have
actually cloned. Going through kickstart, or kickstart + a configuration
management system (like Puppet) ensures that you have your configuration
written down in terms of easily reproducible rules that allow you to
move between different distributions, different hardware, and make
adjustments. Images are a last resort.
That all being said, Andrew Brown was working on adding some image based
cloning tools for use with Cobbler powered by Live CD tech -- for cases
were supporting cloning is required (say, you have a handful of Windows
machines that you have not virtualized yet).
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/PhysicalSystemCloneFeature -- this
can be useful if you have one or two machines that you simply /must/
copy this way and want something simple -- but is not something I would
ever recommend as standard practice. Ideally you would run these
machines as virtual guests, where it becomes much simpler ...
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/AllAboutImages ... this page
describes how Cobbler can track a library of ISO's stored on NFS and
kick off virtual installations from those ISO's. In the case of Windows
(really the only reason I think you'd want to do this), this would be a
sysprep-like modified ISO that was modified to start a fully automated
installation.
For multicast cloning, what you are thinking of is udpcast -- though
building the target images for udpcast that support all possible target
NICs is an annoyance. I have not personally tried it in such scales, I
have heard that it is somewhat abusive on the network. If someone wants
to persue a good way to integrate it into Cobbler, I'm still willing to
consider it, though I think the best strategy is to run non-Linux
operating systems fully virtualizated and deal with them that way (where
image management is MUCH easier) and for the Linux hosts and guests to
use kickstart as much as possible -- or in the case of non-kickstart
based operating systems, AutoYast, preseed, or what have you -- all of
which Cobbler can deal with.
--Michael