Michael DeHaan
2008-Feb-12 16:55 UTC
[Ovirt-devel] Re: [internal-et-mgmt] ovirt integration w/ cobbler
Hugh O. Brock wrote:> On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 11:27:06AM -0500, Michael DeHaan wrote: > >> Is there a list/repo for ovirt development? >> >> I know the subject of provisioning integration came up, and wanted to know >> what I could do to help. >> >> > Hey Michael. Ovirt list is ovirt-devel at redhat.com -- we are about to > announce it. virt-devel at redhat.com will also work. Yes, figuring out > how to do provisioning integration with cobbler is on our list > although we aren't thinking about it quite yet beyond the level of "we > need some way to manage images that are pxe-able as well as a directory of > ISOs." My guess is that cobbler now does this quite well although I am > not using anything like the current version. Any thoughts you have > will be much appreciated... > > Take care, > --Hugh >It doesn't do ISOs yet, but that's something that could be added. It would require some minor cobbler/koan changes. If someone is interested in working with me on that, that's great... if not, if I can better understand the requirements it should not be that complex to add myself. Basically I'm guessing you want to either do: (a) fullvirt provisioning where there is no PXE server, and you can't do kernel+initrd installs like koan does now (like Xen FV works on F8) (b) non-Linux installs (make koan deploy an arbitrary OS) Either way it doesn't seem to be hard to add. Lately I've mostly been working on making sure Cobbler can handle the needs of some of the larger install bases -- which is coming along pretty well. One thing that might also be interesting for ovirt is the koan live CD ... basically it allows you to insert a CD/USB-image into any baremetal machine, boot it, and it will install to whatever cobbler profile you want... this can be either a preset profile, e.g. "foo", or can be detected based on the MAC address. This could be any distro as well, so a F8/F9 based installer image could install EL4. Kinda neat if you need to add new machines to your "cloud" and ovirt isn't the "official" provisioning server. Anyhow, let me know more about what features you need, and I'd be glad to help. The APIs are pretty solid at this point -- Virt-Factory was using them, Cobbler's web UI is using them now, and I can add anything that isn't there. Auth is also pluggable now so we can write a module to use whatever authentication system ovirt might be using. --Michael
On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 11:55:29AM -0500, Michael DeHaan wrote:> > It doesn't do ISOs yet, but that's something that could be added. > > It would require some minor cobbler/koan changes. If someone is > interested in working with me on that, that's great... > if not, if I can better understand the requirements it should not be > that complex to add myself. > > Basically I'm guessing you want to either do: > (a) fullvirt provisioning where there is no PXE server, and you can't > do kernel+initrd installs like koan does now (like Xen FV works on F8) > (b) non-Linux installs (make koan deploy an arbitrary OS)Yep, we've got 2 core use cases: - Deploying the 'managed host' images. This is a pre-built minimal Fedora image essentially onl running libvirt. The idea being you turn on a physical host, it PXE's this image and joins itself to the oVirt management server and can now have guests deployed on it We can build images such that they have a kernel+initrd if needed. - Deploying the guest OS'. This can be any OS, be it Linux, Windows BSD, Solaris, etc. Obviously Fedora / RHEL are trivial since we can always do kernel+initrd from the main distro trees.> One thing that might also be interesting for ovirt is the koan live CD > ... basically it allows you to insert a CD/USB-image into any baremetal > machine, > boot it, and it will install to whatever cobbler profile you want... > this can be either a preset profile, e.g. "foo", or can be detected > based on the MAC > address. This could be any distro as well, so a F8/F9 based installer > image could install EL4. Kinda neat if you need to add new machines > to your "cloud" and ovirt isn't the "official" provisioning server.That sounds like a nice idea for places where we can't directly use PXE.> The APIs are pretty solid at this point -- Virt-Factory was using them, > Cobbler's web UI is using them now, and I can add anything that isn't there. > Auth is also pluggable now so we can write a module to use whatever > authentication system ovirt might be using.Are there any docs on the APIs available for controlling Cobbler ? For authentication we're basically Kerberos enabled throughout. All the services and users have kerberos tickets / principals. If the Cobbler APIs can be setup to go via Apache's mod_kerb that should do the trick quite nicely. At worse we can copy the FreeIPA approach of having Apache do the auth and then proxypass the request through to Cobbler which can read the authenticated username from the HTTP request. Regards, Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|