-----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler- bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Michael DeHaan Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 11:42 AM To: jimi@sngx.net; cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: Stategery regarding Windows support for mixed
environments
James Cammarata wrote:
On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:06:39 -0400, Michael DeHaan
wrote:
This is a development branch thing but it's related to Cobbler's
plan
moving forward, so it seems best to discuss here.
So ... there's been some good work going so far towards supporting
some
variants of Windows, though I see it may perhaps be somewhat of an evolutionary dead-end.
The web page for RIS-Linux in particular does not mention Vista or 2008. Further, I am much more interested in supporting Windows
virtually
than physically -- this should be natural with the increasing
interest
in virtualization and recent interoperability agreements with
Microsoft.
I did originally wonder why there was a focus on RIS and not WDS. Personally, that works well for me, because Vista is being avoided like the plague in many circles including my own company. I understand that focusing on re-implementing the M$ installation method du jour, could be frustrating, but it seemed that the idea was to leverage the ris-linux package which was already doing much of the work. I wouldn't expect a WDS update for cobbler until a wds-linux project is in a well-working state.
For the devel branch (1.7), I'd rather we refocus our efforts into making sure the experience for Windows installs, virtually, is as
good
as possible.
The upside of this is that most of the infrastructure is already in place -- we can already do ISO based fullvirt installs ("cobbler
image
add" with the ISO file residing on NFS) and a next step is to teach it about a virtual
floppy
drive with the SIF answer file on the drive, so it can be fully
scripted.
We already also have the "virt-clone" image type, for being able to
take
an existing disk image and repeatedly clone that image with koan, keeping the same source image on NFS. (The syntax here is "koan --image=foo
--virt",
just like with the ISO based installs for virt).
The goal here is to not invest too much effort in supporting dead-
end
deployment areas and writing code to cater to say, XP vs Vista vs
2003
vs 2008, but handle things generically, with answer files, and images, things we
already
do. On the plus side, there's also much less work in doing this
and
no additional dependencies or things to configure and set up.
Rather than physical deployments this encourages deploying Windows
on
Linux hosts, which makes the Windows machines easier to manage
since
you
can run tools like libvirt and Func on the hosts. See http://www.redhat.com/promo/svvp/
Windows belongs running on virt. In general, for non-Linux OS's,
we
should also concentrate on virt.
--Michael
cobbler mailing list cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
Here are my thoughts on why this may be the correct long term goal,
but bad
for the short term (and by short term I mean the next 5 years).
Small-Mid
size corporations are quite often heterogenous, with many different
OS'es
running in the server room/data center. This is also true with
Large
companies, though you run into issues of momentum and territoriality
there,
so getting new build environments in is not an easy thing to do.
When I was working at a pretty good sized hosting company/Tier-1
ISP,
one
of the complaints I fielded against cobbler was that it was Red Hat specific, which at the time it very much was. In a company that
deployed
RH/Solaris/Windows with fairly equal regularity on real hardware,
there
would be no chance of replacing the in house build systems with
cobbler.
Roger that.
It's increasingly becoming /Linux/ specific, not Red Hat specific, and agnostic to anything running inside a fully virtualized VM (ISO based FV installs, virt clones, etc).
In many cases we also see that the Windows side of the house is
managed
from some other tool, regardless, so we don't need to be able to replace that. When we do, we have virt as our sword -- it allows supporting *anything*.
Virtualization certainly has its place, however currently there are
many
pitfalls preventing its complete adoption (real-time systems in particular). As I stated above, I expect this to change within 5
years or
so, but for now this decision would take away the ability of admins
to use
cobbler as the Swiss-army knife of build servers when deploying to
bare
metal systems. I also believe that if you can establish a beach
head
in
the data center for cobbler, you will open avenues for adoption by demonstrating how easy it is to deploy virtually (no pun intended)
as
many
OSes as are commonly used on many different platforms.
I agree, the Linux philosophy definitely favors the Swiss-army knife approach. It may not be the easiest OS for joe-schmoe to pick up and start using, it may not be the cleanest user experience for the novice user, but it can do whatever you want it to do.
I'd rather seek to do what we do the best that we can do it, rather than spreading ourselves too thin. For mixed Linux/other environments the answer should be virt.
OK, I know you didn't mean it this way, but you telling me what the answer is before I've asked the question is starting to sound more like M$ itself. I'm sure for your deployment Windows run virtually on top of Linux works great. For my deployment, it's a complete non-starter. Vendors that we buy software from are not going to support their software if it's running in this manner. This is especially true for us since most of our software must interoperate with hardware (via USB, firewire, Ethernet, RS232, and proprietary PCI cards to name a few).
I'm obviously a bit biased, being the developer interested in
supporting as
many non-linux os'es as possible, although I certainly understand
the
RH
viewpoint and the stategery involved in the decision. I won't be
heart
broken if we don't decide to support bare metal for most (if not
all)
non-linux os'es, but I do think it's a missed opportunity.
*nod*
As much as I'd like to, we can't hit all the opportunities.
I want to see virtualized Windows (and other OS's) advance, the way we do this is to avoid putting Windows physical installations on life support, and asking folks to embrace
the
virt tooling.
As I mentioned, my company would embrace this about as well as it's embraced Vista (i.e. not at all).
--Michael
cobbler mailing list cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
If you're totally against the RIS integration, what about beefing up the documentation and interfacing for a secondary installation server to install the non-Linux systems? Seems like there could be non-local profiles that point to another system via tftp and grub.