[Ovirt-devel] Some networking and provisioning questions

[David Lutterkort]

On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 20:15 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > I'm inclined to go with solution 1, but I'm willing to be convinced
> > otherwise.
> 
> Out of those options I agree option 1 is most desirable. Either let it
> boot the ISO image, or do a direct kernel+initrd boot of the selected
> OS. 

I think offering a kernel+initrd boot for VM's solves this nicely -
ultimately, that's what PXE is used for almost always.

> I would add one further option - in addition - not instead of this.
> Namely, ability to clone a pre-existing OS template. eg a hosting
> provider may have done generic installs of Fedora, RHEL, Windows, etc.

I would be _very_ careful with this option; for OS's where you can
install cleanly from metadata (e.g. kernel,intird and kickstart) that's
much preferable to provisioning from an image. In the image case, you
have to modify various bits of the image that persist information about
the hardware, e.g. /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. It is also
much easier to keep a small set of yum repos updated rather than needing
to respin images every time there's a critical security fix.

> Provisioning a new VM would just clone this template, and boot it and
> now the end-user can log straight in an customize. No 'installation'
> step as far as the end user is concerned.

That's strictly a UI issue - you can present both install from image and
install from kickstart in the same way. Whether the additional
capabilities of a kickstart install are exposed to the user or not is
similarly a UI question.

David