Michael DeHaan wrote:
Jeff Schroeder wrote:
On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Michael DeHaan mdehaan@redhat.com 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.
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.
To play devil's advocate (I am not in this situation) what about the poor people who just want to make deploying windows on physical hosts easier? It seems like this direction hurts those.
We don't really have a vested interest in making Windows physical deployments easy to deploy.
Why don't we do a dual pronged approach? Make the virtualized windows experience smooth as butter but continue using ris-linux for bare metal windows? Just my 2 cents.
Ultimately it's about what is the best use of time. Keeping things small and focused in Cobbler is something we must always do, and sometimes this means knowing what we should and shouldn't work on.
This list becoming 1/2 about Windows questions would not be good -- and it distracts us from the core mission.
The virtualization seems ideally suited for dealing with such things, and it keeps them simple -- so we can concentrate on other, perhaps more important, work items. (Like that nice shiny RFE list).
--Michael
I should also point out that I spelled 'strategery' wrong.
Apologies to George :)