Daniel Veillard wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 12:41:22PM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> Some distributed stuff to complement the remote features above:
> Cobbler (
http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) integration with virt-manager for
> being able to graphically pick what profile the user wants to install
> from a list of remote boot servers. (There's an XMLRPC API for this),
> and also ways to configure the boot server from a simple GTK app (not
> part of virt-manager). This could be of use where people want to
> roll out configurations that someone else has set up for them, but they
> are not comfortable with the command line tools. Perhaps it would be
> possible to export a set of virt-manager settings to Cobbler for reuse
> by virt-manager users on other machines.
>
I agree we need something along those lines, and IMHO if they are more
comfortable using point and click, I guess they would also prefer have
automatic discovery of where cobbler was installed. Do we have (or could
add) avahi support for discovery of the service.
Added a few days ago upstream, yes (0.6.1 candidate). You have to
install avahi-tools, it's not a hard RPM requires, but if it's there,
cobbler will publish as "cobblerd".
If most install options
could be centralized (think like an automatic setup template based for
example on the user LDAP info), provisioning for a new user could come
as simple an UI as:
"A centralized setting si available, pick one of the OSes"
"Fedora 7"
"Fedora 6"
"Centos 5"
...
Right now Cobbler is all hierarchial (distros -> profiles -> systems)
and there's a XMLRPC API. So you could have a drop down "pick your
distro" and then be
able to pick your profile under the distro. You could optionally be able
to pick a system definition (which includes a MAC address) to deploy but
it would fine
to leave that out if it didn't make sense.
maybe even the processor count and memory size could be defaulted
from the centalized profiles.
Yes you can do this already from the CLI, but being able to make it
trivial and integrated in the virtmanager GUI, would probably make a
big difference in usability.
Yep, I like this.
A good way to fine defaults for each distro would be to see if there is
a default profile named after the distro, which is what "cobbler import"
creates today if you feed it a DVD or rsync mirror. Or they could
optionally pick another profile, and have the option of refining choices
either way.
> libvirt/virt-manager guys are welcome to overrule that suggestion, as
> the previous suggestions are already great :)
>
Nah, but one thing is sure, there is plenty of things interesting
to work on :-)
Daniel