Question about a potential large (or rather: more complicated setup)

[rainer_d]

Hi,

thanks everybody for your feedback.

We do have access to Vcenter to adjust VLANs (for which we have rights to “see”) for VMs (and Remote Console to boot, install). We just can’t create new VMs (with 50-ish engineers, that would create the mother of all sprawls…).

We don’t do VM templates, so every VM is delivered blank. I was under the assumption that to boot such a VM (and install it via PXE), I need a DHCP-server in that subnet (and thus a smart-proxy)?

I am now leaning towards installing a smart-proxy in one of our “more central” vlans/subnets and assigning the interface with the DHCP-server to the machine to be installed as-needed.
The idea is to NAT the primary interface of the SmartProxy into the network where the client is installed, while being able to have only one single pxe-boot network.

This is what I draw from this thread:

Smart-proxy for every subnet you build on?

Hi @lzap, I can totally agree with keeping Foreman out of the business of actually writing dhcpd.conf or named.conf (for that matter) files via a few clicks in the webUI. I can’t really recommend what the best route would be…Having the installer be able to create a “get me started” dhcp/dns config that foreman can work with is awesome. On the other hand, having the installer (or foreman as a whole) be able to setup whatever dhcp/dns configuration an admin can dream up seems out of scope to me…

This is more of a proof-of-concept install. We might later actually settle for ATIX’s “fork” of foreman.

All-in-all, foreman is a massive amount of software that will take a while to wrap one’s mind around.

I take it there is no integration, yet, with any kind of IPAM for the subnets that can be configured?

I know there is an abstraction for IPAM itself, but you still need to create the subnets (AFAIK) - and we have plenty of those, too. We plan to move to a “professional” (commercial) DDI solution soon-ish.