The default Cobbler Snippets just do simple auto partitioning. For a more sophisticated partition layout you need to know what kind of VM you are going to install. KVMs and RHEVs device name is /dev/vda, Xen uses /dev/xvda and ESX /dev/sda. Luckily this can be figured out automatically, those different virtualization vendors are using its own MAC prefixes. So we can add two nice small Cobbler snippets to do the job. In this example, I call them hw-detect and partitioning. ….Read More
Tag: ESX
Deploying RHEL as ESX guests – Kickstarting or using ESX templates?
Some time ago I asked my self the question if it is better to kickstart systems or working with ESX templates when deploying RHEL as ESX guests. I also had some discussions with friends working in the same industry. I tried it and came to the following conclusion: Kickstart the systems is the way to go. Pros: Kickstarted Systems are already up-to-date after installation. Proper SSH host keys. Using ESX templates ends up in having identical SSH host keys, from ….Read More
Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1
Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers. So, what are the news? 1. The bugs in the ….Read More
What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not
As I wrote different times before, RHEL6 is going to have a Kernel based on upstreams 2.6.32 Kernel. Meanwhile Linus Torvalds and his fellows released 2.6.34. Since then – from a System Engineers Point of view – there have some “minor” changes which are affecting the daily work in enterprise environments. I think that Red Hat is aware that RHEL6 is one of its most important releases made so far. RHEL6 Beta-Testers have acknowledged that this is one of the ….Read More
Red Hat’s virtualization strategy has redundancy – Quo vadis?
A couple of days there have been some reports that Red Hat will release a commercialized version of deltacloud, an abstraction layer for different kinds of virtualization technologies and clouds such as VMware, RHEV, Amazon EC2 etc. Red Hat puts a lot of resources on virtualization, they maintain and/or sponsor multiple projects in parallel. The most important from my point of view is libvirt which is as well an abstraction layer for different virtulization technologies such as VMware, KVM, Xen ….Read More
A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1
As promised yesterday, I publish the results of a brief test of RHEL6 Beta 1 and the most important findings. It is my point of view as a system guys daily business. If not stated, this overview is based on a default installation with no customization. General There are new package groups such as “Minimal” with 228 Packages and “Basic Server” with 523 Packages. “Basic Server” is the default installation, which means the default click trough installation compared to RHEL5 ….Read More
Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3
Still no official informations Red Hat is still refusing any questions about the features of RHEL 6 and its Linux Kernel. However: Since Vanilla Kernel 2.6.33 vmxnet3 and pvscsi is supported. Fedora 13 Alpha 3 is shipped with a derivate of Kernel 2.6.33. I still hope that Red Hat is switching to 2.6.33 or back-porting the VMWare code to its 2.6.32 derivative Kernel as known by RHEL 6 Alpha 3. Experiences with F13a3 so far Installing F13a3 on a ESX ….Read More