On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Glenn Lagasse wrote: > During my 10 minute :-) presentation on thursday, Clay and Sarah both > brought up an issue with one of the design points for Virtual Machine > Constructor. Specifically the plan to allow a user to construct a > bootable AI media during Virtual Machine Construction. Their argument > to not doing this is maintainability, supportability and easing the test > matrix. They proposed not allowing the creation of bootable AI media > during Virtual Machine Construction and only allowing the user to > specify a path to a pre-constructed bootable AI piece of media. > > I like this approach. This clearly seperates the payload construction > (bootable AI media) from what is required to construct a Virtual > Machine. Users will need to construct a bootable AI media (or use the > default bootable AI media image) before they can run the Virtual Machine > Constructor. The VMC will take this media and de-construct it so that > it can be used to install the VM the user wants to create. > Additionally, if the user specifies an AI client manifest in the VMC DC > manifest then we'll replace the default AI client manifest on the > bootable AI media (also specified by the user) during the > de-construction phase[1] of the bootable AI media. > > Does anyone have any thoughts on this in addition to what was brought up > on thursday? Does anyone think it's a bad idea?
I think a two-step scheme as this one has the potential to confuse users. The target audience for the VMC work seems to be the cloud/appliance settings where machines need to be provisioned quickly. Why do we want to expose the (implementation) detail of using an AI image to achieve that provisioning in the first place? Alok
