[clug] Virtual Machine 'farms'?

[Alex Satrapa]

On 15/10/2009, at 23:41 , Arjen Lentz wrote:

> Apart from other magic tools, it's fairly easy to clone an existing  
> VM, all you have is some configuration and a disk image.

What I've been doing recently is duplicating a (bare bones Debian  
installed) VMware guest, editing the MAC address, adding the new  
address to the DHCP server, booting the client with its new hostname  
and then customising it from there.

Chef gives me some hope, and then there's this whole "pre-seeding"  
thing I want to explore too. Which raises the question of how much do  
I want to do before the guest boots, and how much do I want to be able  
to do in a repeatable fashion without relying on having access to the  
disk outside the booted guest (after all, the disk might be a physical  
disk in another machine in a cluster, which kinda nixes the clone/edit  
MAC/boot paradigm)

Alex