>
> Hi Stephen. I definitely appreciate the reply.
>
> After reading through the documentation on the Discovery plug-in, I'm left
> with the impression that it's overly complicated, and possibly error-prone
> for what I'm trying to do. It's also lacking in one area. Don't take that
> the wrong way - it seems like a very powerful solution for the right use
> cases (server / datacenter), and I do realize that mine is outside the
> current norm. I do think (and hope) that we'll be seeing more desire/need
> to suit this type of workstation scenario in the future, but the current
> tools for provisioning and management don't seem to be addressing it.
I don't think it's particularly complicated or error prone. You boot a
host, it shows up in Foreman, and you can click a button to provision
it. It's based on Foreman host groups, so in most cases you're just
picking a name and host group.
> Let me see if I understand the high-level here - and please correct me
> where I'm wrong:
>
> 1. Machine is booted using an image containing the discovery
> plug-in/agent
> 2. Discovery sends info to Foreman, and a content host is created.
> 3. Based on Discovery rules, OS and templates are assigned to the host
> record (this basically covers what I mentioned previously about an admin
> having to predefine a host before provisioning)
> 4. If using auto provisioning, host is then rebooted again, and relies
> on DHCP & PXE to jump into "normal" Foreman provisioning process
>
> One issue there is that I don't want to rely on PXE at all as we already
> use PXE on the same subnets to provide Windows builds.
A solution involving only the ISO is coming for Discovery in the next
major release most likely
> Where I mentioned this to be lacking - is that it doesn't seem like it
> would allow choice at boot time.
This is also coming along with the ISO feature.
> Currently with Spacewalk/Cobbler there is
> the ability to choose between several different published OS profiles. For
> instance - keep Fedora 21 as a build option available for a time after
> Fedora 22 is released. Am I wrong here?
We have this, in the form of Host group provisioning, but it's an
unmaintained feature from older versions of Foreman and doesn't
even work with any of the default kickstarts we have now.
It's still also only a PXE/DHCP solution.
The only solution we have at the moment in Foreman for environments
without DHCP/PXE is to use the Bootdisk plugin, in this case you have to
pre-add the host to Foreman, and then boot with the ISO.
The new discovery features I mentioned will probably solve your use
case, we certainly try to accomdate the case where you can't have DHCP
or PXE, but life really is better when you could have a separate
provisioning network for linux systems. If the windows admins get it,
why can't you enjoy the same convienence?
···
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 04:20:10AM -0700, Phil Uithoven wrote:
Thanks again - just trying to understand the options and know what I’m
getting into.
On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 3:59:21 PM UTC-4, stephen wrote:
You might be interested in Discovery
Foreman :: Plugin Manuals
A machine would boot and show up in Foreman, and then you can decide
later what it’ll become with just a button or two.
If you setup discovery rules, you can have the machine autoprovision
itself.
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Best Regards,
Stephen Benjamin
Red Hat Engineering
