This is a development branch thing but it's related to Cobbler's plan
moving forward, so it seems best to discuss here.
So ... there's been some good work going so far towards supporting some
variants of Windows, though I see it may perhaps be somewhat of an
evolutionary dead-end.
The web page for RIS-Linux in particular does not mention Vista or
2008. Further, I am much more interested in supporting Windows virtually
than physically -- this should be natural with the increasing interest
in virtualization and recent interoperability agreements with Microsoft.
For the devel branch (1.7), I'd rather we refocus our efforts into
making sure the experience for Windows installs, virtually, is as good
as possible.
The upside of this is that most of the infrastructure is already in
place -- we can already do ISO based fullvirt installs ("cobbler image
add" with the ISO file
residing on NFS) and a next step is to teach it about a virtual floppy
drive with the SIF answer file on the drive, so it can be fully scripted.
We already also have the "virt-clone" image type, for being able to take
an existing disk image and repeatedly clone that image with koan,
keeping the same
source image on NFS. (The syntax here is "koan --image=foo --virt",
just like with the ISO based installs for virt).
The goal here is to not invest too much effort in supporting dead-end
deployment areas and writing code to cater to say, XP vs Vista vs 2003
vs 2008, but handle
things generically, with answer files, and images, things we already
do. On the plus side, there's also much less work in doing this and
no additional dependencies
or things to configure and set up.
Rather than physical deployments this encourages deploying Windows on
Linux hosts, which makes the Windows machines easier to manage since you
can run
tools like libvirt and Func on the hosts. See
http://www.redhat.com/promo/svvp/
Windows belongs running on virt. In general, for non-Linux OS's, we
should also concentrate on virt.
--Michael
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