[CentOS] automated remote cloning

Sun Jan 2 03:50:57 UTC 2011
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 6:50 AM, Geoff Galitz <geoff at galitz.org> wrote:
>
> Good morning/day and Happy New Year.
>
> We have a geographically distributed environment (marketing speak: cloud)
> where we regularly need to migrate individual systems to new hardware (for
> bigger disks or for better geographical placement, for example).  We
> currently use Cobbler to do our base installs automatically and I am now
> looking at integrating Clonezilla with Cobbler.  The goal is take an
> *individual* system that has been customized and migrate it in an automated
> fashion.

The "RHEL" way is to use RHN. I don't recommend it, it's expensive and
requires an Oracle server even if you want to install your own based
on the "Spacewalk" toolkit.

More efficiently, you can use 'mock' or other tools to build a
stripped chroot cage, tarball it up, then un-tarball it and apply
patches as needed. Then push tools to partition the disk, mount the
partitions, apply the tarball on it, and configure to your particular
needs. I've probably done..... 20,000 systems this way, with the
approach dating all the way back to RedHat 5.2.

Properly done, you can even write a remote installer that grabs your
existing swap space, stuffs the OS image *there*, then rebuilds the OS
around the existing allocated swap space, then releases and
re-apportions. That's less trivial.

> We currently do this using Cobbler and then running rsync and mysqldump in a
> script along with other system -> userland module configurations (such as
> PHP modules) but the process is tedious and generally a PITA.  We also must
> have the ability to run this across different datacenters on different
> continents.

Push or pull the OS image tarball first. You  can strip out the
sensitive data. such as unlocked passwords, and push commands from
your central repository to reset those passwords with their encrypted
versions if necessary.

> Any pointers to good automated solutions?
>
>
> References:
>
> https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/ClonezillaIntegration
>
>
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