On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/10/2010 12:37 PM, Ross Walker wrote:
I think it is unfortunate how difficult it is to back up a working linux machine and restore it onto different hardware, given that the system really is very hardware independent. But, detecting the hardware and mapping it to device drivers seems to be a black art hidden inside of anaconda and then the local hardware related settings are fairly hopelessly intertwined with application and user preferences in your backup copies. I always thought that this would be a common enough problem that some distribution would address it, but so far it hasn't happened.
That's why God invented the systems administrator!
Well, yeah - I suppose you could say the design is good for the job security of sysadmins and for requiring support subscriptions from the distribution vendors, but it's something that the computer really should be able to handle by itself just like it does during the initial install.
Computers are dumb, and if we give too much power to the OS vendors they'll enslave us.
Here I use kickstart scripts for baseline server types that perform all the basic configurations on install.
Have you totaled up the hours you've spend on these tasks that would be unnecessary in a better-designed system? And even if that sort-of makes sense for servers that have a basic "type", what about ones that have application developers as users and end up accumulating all kinds of cruft that you don't know about?
After the initial time to research and setup the system the time to maintain and extend was minimal, and these were setup a long, long, long time ago (circa Windows 2000), use rsync or DFSR to replicate the config to other deployment servers in remote offices.
I definitely recommend it.
Just need to setup clear policies with the developers, save your work here and it will be recoverable, save your work there and you are SoL.
If I am setting up an ESXi infrastructure the first thing I would do is setup a Cobbler server and a Windows deployment server (maybe a Solaris Jump Start server) and integrate it with the VMware vCenter templates. Then it's all point-n-click server deployment from there.
Don't forget that you can use ESXi for free, but not vCenter. But, there's really no problem in just copying/cloning VMware images around - you don't have to go through any extra contortions to be able to reproduce them (with variations for every OS), you just need to save a baseline copy before adding specialized applications.
Sure, I just mentioned vCenter as I use it here, but as in the email to John, it could easily be scripted from a VM.
No need to clone or image either, I can have a server deployed over the network in much quicker time then if I imaged it and a whole lot easier to maintian long-term then a clone.
-Ross