[one-users] using PXE to boot xen hvm

[Jaime Melis]

Hello Steve,

This is a very interesting email, mainly because one of the upcoming
features we want to deliver with the next release of OpenNebula is
integration with bare metal provisioning systems. So, I'd like to take this
opportunity to ask for more opinions from the community about this feature.
So, a few questions for the community:
- Do you have a favourite PXE installation system you want to see
OpenNebula integrated with
- Is there any specific feature of the bare metal provision system you'd
like to see addressed?
- Do you have any ideas / suggestions about this?

For the moment, let me describe you what we do internally at OpenNebula to
address this problem.

- Manually install the bare metal system (once) and configure it:
  - network dhcp
  - remove persistent udev rules
  - configure hypervisor
  - oneadmin user, ruby, and the rest of opennebula dependencies
  - add SSH keys
  - etc
- Restart the server and boot from system rescue cd [1]
- Backup the system installation by doing 'dd|gzip' of the disk drive over
NFS to our NAS

Once that's ready we deploy with a small webapp internally developed
utility that does the following:
- the webapp configures the tftpboot so that the server will boot a system
rescue cd over pxe
- once when the system rescue boots it automatically executes an autorun
script [2] that is dynamically served by http by the webapp wich contains
the command to  dump the backed up image to the disk. (I'm happy to share
more configuration specific details)

As you can see this has a few shortcomings, the most important one being
that we aren't using kickstarts, basically because we want to cover all the
OS.

And answering your question about what do we use for Xen, we are currently
using openSUSE since it has an out-of-the-box support for Xen which makes
life a lot easier.

[1] http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage
[2]
http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_autorun

Cheers,
Jaime


On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:34 PM, Steve Heistand <steve.heistand at nasa.gov>wrote:

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> Hash: SHA1
>
> Im curious to know peoples' thoughts on how to take bare hardware
> without an OS and get a xen aware base kernel on it so it will
> take guest OS's from opennebula?
>
> I was looking around for options involving various live cds,
> found a nice livecd-xen thing but it hangs are boot time on our nodes.
> the console was complaining about a bad .iso file when it booted
> but the md5sum of it is at it should be. (its booted up with
> memdisk/gpxelinux/httpd)
>
> is there a handy/easy way to get new empty hardware available for
> opennebula?
>
> thanks
>
> steve
>
>
>
> - --
> ************************************************************************
>  Steve Heistand                          NASA Ames Research Center
>  email: steve.heistand at nasa.gov          Steve Heistand/Mail Stop 258-6
>  ph: (650) 604-4369                      Bldg. 258, Rm. 232-5
>  Scientific & HPC Application            P.O. Box 1
>  Development/Optimization                Moffett Field, CA 94035-0001
> ************************************************************************
>  "Any opinions expressed are those of our alien overlords, not my own."
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-- 
Jaime Melis
Project Engineer
OpenNebula - The Open Source Toolkit for Cloud Computing
www.OpenNebula.org | jmelis at opennebula.org
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