Miguel Costa wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
I use cobbler to provision xen guests and perceus
(http://www.perceus.org) to provision stateless images on nodes of
hpc clusters, which are probably different from thin clients only in
the use they are given :). From where I stand, it would be great if
cobbler could manage something similar (I guess that's why I'm on
both these lists :) )
What does Perceus do that Cobbler does not in your usage?
well, in a nutshell, at least the way I use them (I might me missing
some feature)
cobbler: I create profiles, which are essentially managed kickstarts,
and assign them to systems. When this system boots from pxe (or is
created by koan --virt), it gets installed according to that profile.
I usually use cobbler only once per system.
perceus: I create "capsules", which are stateless system images, and
assign them to nodes. When the nodes boot from pxe, the capsule is
transferred to the node, where it runs from ram (so the node can be
diskless). Perceus is used every time the nodes boot.
With systems provisioned with cobbler, the result is a bunch of
independent systems, which without other configuration management
tools will each follow their own way, at least until they are
reinstalled. For xen guests, this is precisely what I need, since each
system is used for different purposes.
With nodes provisioned with perceus, the configuration is controlled
by the capsule which resides on the server. I just change the capsule
on the server and push the changes to the nodes, or reboot the nodes
for more drastic changes. The bottom line is that I only manage two
systems, the server and the capsule, which just happens to run on a
large number of nodes. For a hpc cluster, this is precisely what I
need, since each node is used only to compute and send results home.
In this case, the capsule seems very analogous to a config management
profile that Stateless Project was attempting, right? I'm probably
missing some of the finer points. If I am, can you explain further?
FWIW I recently shot out an email to Cobbler-list about having cobbler
dynamically generate the external_nodes information for Puppet, so it
will make it easier to link cobbler profiles with puppet profiles. Look
for that in a future release. If that's unrelated that's ok :)
Perceus doesn't have a web interface though :)
miguel
--Michael
--
Miguel Costa
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