[cobbler] Ideal home test lab setup for testing out cobbler?

Scot Floess sfloess at redhat.com
Sat Nov 3 01:25:44 UTC 2012


Zach,

I definitely do this at home.  I suppose you could call it a small lab - but I do more than test stuff in that I spin up VMs for normal work-level stuff (some tinkering, some to support my open source projects)...

I do switch servers/hardware around a lot.  Lately, I've been on a power-less kick, trying to utilize the minimum amount of power I can but still do the most with what I have (and only turn on my power hungry boxes when need be)...

My current setup is:

- DLInk DNS-320 NAS (two 256 GB sata drives).  Runs Debian squeeze and is my DNS, DHCP (internal to house) DDNS box (so my VMs/bare metal can register their names with DNS), NFS and Samba server.  Also is a TFTP server for PXE booting my bare metal.

- Acer Aspire pos (piece of bleep) laptop.  Runs CentOS 5.8 centosplus Xen and is my Cobbler and Puppet server.  Also sports a CI VM (CentOS 6.3) (specifically Jenkins) and sometimes other various low requirement VMs.

- Dell Latitude CPx-something-or-other pos laptop (1.2 GHz model w/ 512 MB RAM).  Runs CentOS 5.8 bare metal mostly for a side display using synergy controlled from my work laptop (when I work from home).

- Two Dell Precision 470's running CentOS 5.8 Xen centosplus as hosts for VMs - each has 4GB RAM.

- One Sun 64-bit early generation dual opteron box - running CentOS 5.8 Xen centosplus as hosts for VMs.  Has 8GB RAM.

- Have a P4 box with what I believe is a broken IDE controller.  Am looking into doing diskless boots with it, but haven't spent too much time on that yet...hope to sometime soon :)

Interestingly enough I am NFS mounting a TFTP dir from my NAS but having Cobbler pos laptop write out the PXE magic to that dir...

I call it my top-of-the-line server room circa 96 :)

I can spin up a ton of VMs on the "better" boxes.  None of what I have supports full virtualization - I'm stuck using paravirtualization.  However, CentOS 5.8 as a host OS is definitely fine for my needs.  Everything also runs puppet for configuration.  I provision all my VMs using KOAN, and bare metal using PXE off the Cobbler pos laptop...

Flossy

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Zack Perry" <zack.perry at sbcglobal.net>
> To: cobbler at lists.fedorahosted.org
> Sent: Friday, November 2, 2012 9:06:33 PM
> Subject: [cobbler] Ideal home test lab setup for testing out cobbler?
> 
> I have finally moved to a bigger place. Now I finally have some space
> to setup a home test lab for testing various cobbler related ideas.
>  Currently, my new place has AT&T Uverse Internet service, a 2Wire
> 3600HGV Router, I have also got a few notebooks and netbooks as my
> first set of test hardware. Nearly all of them run Linux (CentOS,
> SL, Ubuntu, and Fedora), only one runs Windows XP/Home SP3.
> 
> I am sure that I am not the only who want to have a home-based test
> lab :-)  For these who have gone down this route, do you mind
> sharing a bit of your setup?  I am most interested in getting some
> cost-effective hardware for my own "small lab".  I have got a few
> notebooks.  Very proficient in RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, and KVM.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> --Zack.
> _______________________________________________
> cobbler mailing list
> cobbler at lists.fedorahosted.org
> https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
> 

-- 
Make It So Number One


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