Kock, Boris - Acision wrote:
Hi all,
Recently I discovered cobbler. First of all, a word of thanks for creating this great
product.
Next to cobbler I have also used koan to deploy vmware server guest systems on vmware
server. I tried it with vmware server 2.0 to see if it would be supported ... as you might
know it is not (yet), since the command line interface to create virtual machines has
changed. With some 'hacking' it is possible to get it to work. However I broke the
vmware server 1.0.x support with that.
Is it possible to test for the version inside of the koan/vmwcreate.py?
I'd think it would be.
Before starting the task of integrating this properly in the koan
code a couple of questions, based on what I noticed with testing:
1. On a number of places in the koan code checks are done for the libvirt api. Reading
the libvirt documentation I did not find any reference to support for vmware now or in the
future.
Correct... not all install types in koan use libvirt. We wish they all
could, but vmware is a special case (and well, it's also proprietary,
but widely used enough that I think making Linux easier to install on it
is goodness)
In order to be able to use koan on systems < FC8 to install vmware
guest it makes sense to remove these checks for vmware actions. Is there a reason for the
checks in the current code?
Ah, I think I follow, you're saying that libvirt must be installed even
if you're using vmware. Yes, we should bypass those checks if the
virt-type is not libvirt based. 100% correct.
2. Since the command syntax changed for vmware server it is necessary
to be able to make the distinction between vmware server 1.0.x and vmware server 2.x. The
best solution in my opinion seems to spli the --virt-type=vmware option in
--virt-type=vmwares1 and virt-type=vmwares2. Does this make sense?
If we can't do it at runtime on the system, that's ok by me, though we
should probably make a "vmwares2" and leave the original as the "1"
for
backwards compat reasons. Ideally if we can query the package to find
out (even the RPM version) that's probably a better way to go.
3. Is there a reason why the command syntax and help are different
for cobbler and koan?
The help is different in cobbler because we have multiple layers of
subcommands before we get to optparse, but when we get to the options,
both use optparse.
Is there another difference you might be pointing out?
Additionally, I should point out that we do also have a VMware
workstation virt type -- we've still never done ESX. If you're
interested in that, that would be an awesome module to add. If not,
this is something we'll probably look into for a future release.
Thanks!
--Michael