Automated Imaging Process Options

Ray Van Dolson rvandolson at esri.com
Fri Sep 28 18:11:50 UTC 2007


Hello all, looking for some ideas and feedback from the pool of
sysadmins out there. :)

We have a scenario where developers are making use of blade centers on
which they want to run multiple operating systems on their blades and
switch out these OS'es as-needed (and fairly often).

Currently they are able to use a solution like Symantec's Ghost Console
where they log into a central Ghost server and can tell a connected
client (one of the blades) to re-image itself with whichever flavor of
Windows they desire.  The machine auto-reboots and re-ghosts itself and
does some post-install configuration too.

This is great as it lets the developers do this themselves and is
basically hands-off for us.

However, there is no Ghost Client for Linux and so as the developers
start throwing RHEL and SLES into the mix, the Ghost Console no longer
is a viable solution.

Another admin here came up with a script and batch file solution that
essentially modifies the boot.ini and grub files when a script is run
telling it to re-ghost itself on reboot.  Images are stored locally on
a hidden partition.  This works well enough but requires significant
lead-up setup time and obviously the developers have to run a script or
batch file instead of a nice GUI (which is acceptable I guess).

I'm wondering if there are better solutions out there and/or how some
of you are dealign with this type of scenario.

SystemImager would be great, except that it doesn't appear to support
Windows...

We've also considered clustering the balde centers and running many
vmware guests (or Xen perhaps?) making it easy to just start and stop
whichever guest the developer needed.

I'm goign to bug Symantec about creating a Linux client for their
console product, but don't have any hope that this will be completed
soon.

Any sort of ideas would be appreciated.  I'd rather not recreate work
if necessary and would be more than happy to contribute to an existing
project that might come close to meeting our needs.

TIA as always
Ray




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