[one-users] using PXE to boot xen hvm

[christopher barry]

On Mon, 2012-11-05 at 18:19 -0500, Jaime Melis wrote:
> 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

iPXE is by far the best PXE implementation.

> - Is there any specific feature of the bare metal provision system
> you'd like to see addressed?

Use a diskless kvm host over iSCSI (iSER ideally), configure it with the
same context methodology you're using for guests. Use a local SSD in the
host physical machine for swap.

> - 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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>         
>         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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