Cloning of VM hosts

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Hello,

hosts in Foreman can be cloned for a very long time. But this feature always has been problematic with Compute Resources because it is not well defined what to do for clones with the metadata. Clone in Foreman is a new host record, however, it often shares the same resources in the cloud or hypervisor (the same VM). The cloning feature is unclear and behavior inconsistent depending on the Compute Resource implementation.

While working on another fix for incorrectly cloned metadata, I expressed my opinion that we could remove the cloning functionality for Compute Resources alltogether. The patch is up for reviews.

I would like to gather your feedback on this. Do you use VM cloning in Foreman and how? Shall we keep the status quo when some compute resources work, others do not? Or shall we perhaps convert cloned host to bare metal hosts instead?

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I cannot remember when I used clone the last time and I see it only seldom used by customers.

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hmm cloning has been the easier way for my colleagues to create hosts in Foreman because the UI for host creation with vmware compute resources can be intimidating for a self service approach when the person using it hasn’t got much knowledge about Foreman.

We had developed LISA GitHub - dm-drogeriemarkt/lisa: Lovely interface for SysAdmins · GitHub for this use case but abandoned it because we have fewer and fewer users who need hosts and theirfor decided that it was to much to maintain.

So I would like to keep cloning but i can understand that it should be available to all compute resources. Maybe the conversion is the best idea?

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In general, we do not really use the clone feature in Foreman. Some of my colleagues rarely use it for very “special” systems with a lot of non-default settings that do not fit our existing automation workflows. From time to time we need do create identically configured “duplicates” of these systems and in these cases having clone available is nice so people can’t miss any configuration options. All of these Systems run on VMWare with network based installations, where the behavior we experience aligns with our expectations and the documented behavior (spawn a “create host” dialogue with identical settings, from where you can create a new VM). We are currently in the process of moving parts of our environment from VMWare to Proxmox and I was told that cloning currently does not work there.

If the feature was gone, we would likely resort to writing some automation that essentially emulates the current implementation. Not a deal breaker, but I would prefer to keep the current functionality, at least in the cases where it’s working as intended.