[clug] Virtual Machine 'farms'?

[Alex Satrapa]

On 15/10/2009, at 23:28 , Daniel Pittman wrote:

> One, it is much easier to treat the VM as a bit of real hardware,  
> and make
> sure it boots from the network when first run.  Then you can use the  
> same OS
> deployment tools that you use for the rest of your systems to build  
> it,
> including setting up post-install chef, etc, work.

I don't have "the rest of your systems". I have three computers with a  
plethora of virtual machines.

"the rest of your systems" are for computer geeks who think the 90s  
were cool. I can say that now because I threw out 8 pre-pentium  
systems at the last big computer recycling day.

> Two, non-ESX VMWare is actually pretty trivial to work with: their
> configuration files are pleasantly plain-text, and tend to just work.

Yup, I'm quite happy with that. There's the MAC address, right there!  
It's so easy :)

> libvirt set out explicitly to enable this.

Will investigate, thanks for the tip.

> Now, my turn: what platform(s) are you using Chef on

None yet.

I have a bunch of virtual machines, one which has recently been set up  
as a PXE server (but that service will be migrated to the host Real  
Soon Now™ along with the Chef server.

The next step is to get all the way from non-existent virtual machine  
to booted, OS installed, chef client installed, machine visible in  
iClassify.

This is all part of the talk I'm planning to give in a couple of weeks  
(or whenever I've been shuffled to in the programme). I'm doing an  
Isaac Asimov, one might say.

Alex