RE: RHEL6.5 provisioning without DHCP (Ess, Brandon)

Spike,

Well said. I accomplish this in a similar way except I PXEboot to load the kernel and initrd, and then kickstart the OS installer in non-interactive install.

I try to use a generic as possible KS files, and then once the install is accomplished the host shows up in Foreman and I select the most appropriate Puppet host group

#RHEL-6.6 Workstation PuppetClient
LABEL RHEL-6.6 (64-bit) Workstation PuppetClient
MENU PASSWD HASHEDPASSWD
MENU PASSPROMPT Enter Password:
MENU PASSWORDMARGIN 26
MENU PASSWORDROW 12
KERNEL rhel/x86_64/6/vmlinuz
APPEND ks=http://URL/ks/rhel6-workstation-puppetclient.ks initrd=rhel/x86_64/6/initrd.img ramdisk_size=10000 ksdevice=eth0 ip=dhcp

Then in my KS file:

url --url http://URL/rhel/6/x86_64/6.6/os

-Brandon

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Spike White
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2014 8:17 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RHEL6.5 provisioning without DHCP (Ess, Brandon)

Brandon,

With Dell DRACs, you can "attach virtual media".  I.e., either a CD image
or a disk image.  I'm guessing HP's remote access controller is similar.

Using that, the original post (Frantisek) can do the CD-based install he wants.
I.e., have the image on his local Windows or Linux desktop, attach that virtual
media via DRAC.

We customarily do that for 10 - 100 servers. I'm guessing a good engineer
can image 5 servers per hour -- if the ks.cfg has all answers, so the install
is non-interactive.

There are some limitations.  Because virtual media attachment is dog-slow. It's best to:
   1. minimize the image size as much as possible.
   2. have your desktop in a close network location to the servers you're imaging.

For this second reason, we usually maintain "jump" servers in different geographic
regions.  For instance, when I'm imaging a server in Brazil, I'll remote (Windows)
or XRDP (Linux) into a Brazil jump server, image from there.

If by "large number of servers" is meant a few hundred or more, the original
poster will either need PXE or a large array of heads-down engineers.

Spike

> From: "Ess, Brandon" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
> To: Discussion list about Kickstart <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
> Cc:
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 18:01:15 +0000
> Subject: RE: RHEL6.5 provisioning without DHCP
> Good luck. If you find a way to remotely provision a server without PXE (PXE requires DHCP) let us know.
>
> If they are Dell Servers there is IDRAC. While I’ve never used the Enterprise features, it does support bare-metal provisioning but if I remember correctly the provisioning service is just a rebranded Cobbler service….which requires DHCP.

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