On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 02:22:04PM -0400, Christopher Covington wrote:
Hi,
I'm running Anaconda regularly and I plan on continuing to do so, but there are certain circumstances where I'd like to lock down all the package versions and provision many similar systems as quickly as possible. So I'm looking for an automated and reliable mechanism for generating disk images for use on "bare metal" or physical (not virtualized) installs. The images will probably be copied to SATA*.
How are the disk images currently generated? Does Jim manually launch an install with the documented [1] kickstart file and then move the storage medium to another machine and run dd? Or is it more automated?
Looking through the archives I see Richard announcing virt-builder and virt-install availability for AArch64. It looks very useful for this sort of task. Are there any reasons to not use its output on a non-virtualized, physical instance? ("V2P"?)
Yes, you can provision baremetal machines using virt-builder. I have done this and it works just fine.
Plug in the SATA disk, and simply do:
virt-builder --arch aarch64 centos-7.2 -o /dev/sdX
Note that you will probably need to use same arch for the provisioning(? host? whatever the terminology is) machine as for the target, otherwise useful options like --install won't work.
Rich.
Then there's livemedia-creator [2]. Would it be best to use that to wrap the virt-install invocation?
If anyone has experience and guidance with the above tools or alternatives, especially on AArch64, it would be appreciated. The documentation looks very good for these tools but some aspects like authoring kickstart files which are compatible with lorax/livemedia-creator seem particularly tricky.
Thanks, Cov
- Not essential, but having the option to do some kind of read-only
Network Block Device (NBD) root filesystem which many systems could share, with a local, writeable, essentially throw-away overlay might be handy.
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