One of the recent developments in libvirt (RHEL 5.1 and later, Fedora 8
and later) is "libvirt remote" which allows for doing installs remotely
without helper tools, if the right libraries are already preinstalled.
Some details here:
http://libvirt.org/remote.html
I can see this being incorporated in cobbler as follows:
cobbler system vivify --name=foosball --on-host=host1.example.org
cobbler profile vivify --name=airhockey --on-host=host2.example.com
This would contact the remote system using libvirt-remote (probably over
SSH) and install the guest right from the cobbler command line, without
having to SSH in to the other system to run koan (or install koan, if
required).
Older RHEL/Fedora guests should still need koan, and koan would not be
going away. For instance, koan is useful for actions that are
initiated by users who are not in control of the cobbler server -- such
developers installing profiles -- it serves an important purpose.
Thoughts or improvements on the above proposal?
I'll probably begin exploring this relatively soon. It seems to be a
useful feature and relatively low impact in that it would not have to
impact to many other areas of cobbler. Cobbler would of course not
import libvirt unless this feature was being used, to prevent
RPM-dependency-bloat on hosts such as RHEL 4 (as Cobbler is supported
there).
--Michael.