Ovirt devel - Apr 2008 - [patch] oVirt / Cobbler Integration

Attached is the first attempt to integrate the cobbler xmlrpc API into 
oVirt. As it stands, cobbler can be enabled / configured via 
config/cobbler.yml and oVirt will call out to the remote cobbler server 
to retrieve and set profiles for systems. It should be fairly simple / 
straightforward to add cobbler functionality to oVirt, we simply need to 
add new methods to the cobbler_helper and invoke them in the appropriate 
places.

    Have a great weekend,
       -Mo


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Mohammed Morsi wrote:
> Attached is the first attempt to integrate the cobbler xmlrpc API into 
> oVirt. As it stands, cobbler can be enabled / configured via 
> config/cobbler.yml and oVirt will call out to the remote cobbler 
> server to retrieve and set profiles for systems. It should be fairly 
> simple / straightforward to add cobbler functionality to oVirt, we 
> simply need to add new methods to the cobbler_helper and invoke them 
> in the appropriate places.
>
>    Have a great weekend,
>       -Mo
>
Hi Mo,

A few general comments/questions:

1) Michael is currently adding Kerberos support to Cobbler -- I'm not 
sure how stable that is now, but since we're already using kerberos for 
everything else, it might make sense to use it for Cobbler auth too.
2) The way this is written now, the cobbler profile is set on the VM 
show page -- however, the profile is only useful for initial creation, 
so we really need to include the cobbler profile on the VM creation form 
-- so we'll need, at minimum, to add a cobbler profile field to the vm 
DB model
3) You're using the description field as the cobbler system identifier 
-- this isn't currently constrained to be unique, and it can change at 
any time. At one point, Cobbler's only way of identifying a system was 
by mac address -- I'm not sure if this is still the case, or if it 
supports UUIDs too, but in any case we need to use the right identifier.


The final point is one that way may not want to tackle now, but we 
should keep in mind that Cobbler won't be the only provisioning 
mechanism supported. We'll need to support ISO images, and possibly 
other mechanisms. I'm not sure of the best way to do this. The simplest 
would be to just add an install_iso field to vms, in addition to the 
cobbler_profile field -- but this might become a bit unwieldy if we add 
more provisioning types, or if these provisioning types require 
additional metadata. Another way would be to create an InstallImage or 
Provisioning ActiveRecord class -- with subclasses for CobblerProfile, 
IsoImage, etc. include a :has_one relation in Vm.

Scott