We are looking at overall orchestrating, including automatic hardware installation, image download and bootup. We need to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4, and discover hardware configuration and capabilities if possible. I want to be able to put up any X.86/ARM system, switches and routers, turn them up, have them connected directly to the network, discover them by management plane, download the appropriate image, have them boot up from the downloaded OS and report success back to the network. That is, zero-touch hardware bringup. That could be done based on a hardware serial number or some form of identifier to a particular image. Would you recommend Cobbler for this kind of operation ? What would be the benefit compared to plain PXE boot or Ansible or Openstack Ironic/TripleO ? ThanksNirlay
Hi Nirlay,
Cobbler has the potential to address your needs but it's important to spell out the steps required to make it happen.
Usually folks do this sort of thing by dhcp client identifiers (MAC OUI, dhcp options, etc.) and have the appropriate next server and filenames set for tftp.
That's fairly simple to do.
Done on a hardware serial number, hmm? I'm not sure how'd you do that with Cobbler/Ansible/PXE/or any of the others without the ability to first have the system boot an OS.
Perhaps you could describe your vision in my specific details?
Cheers, Harry
On 10/27/14 12:52 PM, Nirlay Kundu wrote:
We are looking at overall orchestrating, including automatic hardware installation, image download and bootup. We need to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4, and discover hardware configuration and capabilities if possible. I want to be able to put up any X.86/ARM system, switches and routers, turn them up, have them connected directly to the network, discover them by management plane, download the appropriate image, have them boot up from the downloaded OS and report success back to the network. That is, zero-touch hardware bringup. That could be done based on a hardware serial number or some form of identifier to a particular image. Would you recommend Cobbler for this kind of operation ?
What would be the benefit compared to plain PXE boot or Ansible or Openstack Ironic/TripleO ?
Thanks
Nirlay
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On 27 October 2014 18:52, Nirlay Kundu nirlay@hotmail.com wrote:
We are looking at overall orchestrating, including automatic hardware installation, image download and bootup. We need to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4, and discover hardware configuration and capabilities if possible. I want to be able to put up any X.86/ARM system, switches and routers, turn them up, have them connected directly to the network, discover them by management plane, download the appropriate image, have them boot up from the downloaded OS and report success back to the network. That is, zero-touch hardware bringup. That could be done based on a hardware serial number or some form of identifier to a particular image. Would you recommend Cobbler for this kind of operation ?
What would be the benefit compared to plain PXE boot or Ansible or Openstack Ironic/TripleO ?
You are light on details, but I would imagine you'd want to have each host self-catalog in some central data store, then after you have made some decisions about what to do with a host, you'd have it perform some OS provisioning before reporting back with credentials and/or being absorbed into your CM system.
You will also need to wire a lot of this together yourself. Cobbler can certainly form a part of your solution, but you should read up on what Cobbler is and isn't. If you're looking to perform automated installs of specific distributions then it could be a good fit. Another component you might want to look at is Collins (http://tumblr.github.io/collins/).
For auto-cataloging by serial number; unless you have some reliable out of band mechanism for obtaining this information, you'll have to netboot a micro-distro of some sort to inspect the host hardware and post back to a central API. Collins has a specific API endpoint for achieving this, though you will presently need to build the aforementioned micro-distro yourself. I've found Debirf (http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net/wiki/debirf) to be useful in this respect.
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