Kickstart Appliance

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/148

Use to provision virtual and physical Linux systems through Kickstart

[Judge-Dredd]

What does the appliance do and what unique value does it provide to the intended audience:

Useful, but not unique. Sounds easy to use, but how are new install images added ?

Innovative use of virtualization technology:

none.

Size of the appliance relative to functionality and performance:

How much under 500 MB for the base system? This could be much smaller.

Size including install image(s) needs to be large, but could the appliance be shipped sub 50MB with no install images and

users add images themselves?

Comments:

Sounds like it could be useful in the right environment. The large size is the major downfall.

Note : This review is based only on the appliance description, not on the actual appliance

[kirkbauer]

I hope you didn't score the appliance without even trying it out.

There are a couple other PXE appliances, but there weren't any when I started this. Although this uses PXE, it is specifically created to install any Linux that supports Kickstart, such as Fedora, Red Hat, and their derivatives.

Have you ever set up an environment for doing PXE-based Kickstart installs? Sure I can do it in under an hour (assuming I already have the ISOs) but if you haven't done it before it can take all day. You have to set up an FTP, NFS, or Web server, set up a TFTP server, and properly configure a DHCP server. You have to properly extract the ISOs and properly configure the TFTP server tree. In addition, most of the time I see PXE environments that only support one OS and one Kickstart file for all hosts (because doing anything more manually can be a pain). You also have to find or create your own Kickstart file.

This appliance has everything set up for you and is PRELOADED with Fedora Core 4. You should realize that Fedora Core 4 comes on 4 CDs, and it is almost included in the appliance in its entirety, accounting for most of the nearly 2GB size. You can download and load additional ISOs into the appliance through its web interface.

In addition, this appliance has the best web-based Kickstart generator I know about, better than the one you get when you buy Red Hat's Satellite Server.

Yes, the appliance could be shrunk down to < 200MB easy if it did not include any ISO images, but then the first thing you would have to do is download and import 2GB of ISO images, which is not fast. For the contest, I felt it best to not require so much work before it can even do anything.

Innovative use of virtualization technology... not none. You can instantly have a very nice Kickstart server set up in the amount of time it would take you to download just the ISO images yourself. Even more important, if you want a new web server, you create a new virual machine, and use the KickstartWeb interface to create a profile appropriate for a web server, and then hit F12 to PXE-install it. If you are in a large company and have 10, 20, or even more unique types of servers (web, mail, app server, firewall, etc), why take the time and space to create a VMware template for each one when you can simply provision the box from scratch in only a couple of minutes? Better yet, what if you have 10 different profiles based on Fedora Core 4, and want to upgrade to Fedora Core 5? With this appliance, you just import the new ISOs and change the distribution each profile is linked to. With a template or cloning method, you'd have to manually rebuild all of your template systems.

Sure, this is not very useful for an individual, but it is a server application for use by sysadmins who want to provision Linux quickly, whether virually or physically. I agree that a smaller version that does not contain Fedora Core 4 would be useful for enterprise users, however for them a 2GB download is not a show-stopper either.

[williambishop]

No worries mate, we'll give it a try. I'll hit it this weekend, if it is as you described, that would ease contract deployments by not having to set everything up(I'm not as fast as you, it can take me a couple hours or more). The size will probably hurt you for the judging, but you will find several users if it works reliably. My appliance that I carry around is loaded=45 gigs, unloaded=5gigs so, those of us who do this work a lot won't mind the size if it's fully functional.

Don't worry about dredd, he's pessimistic at times.

[HackerJoe]

Is the download avail anywhere else. The BitTorrent download has been down for almost a week with the tracker unreachable on port 6969.

\[2006-06-26 12:42:08] "KickstartAppliance.tar.bz2" : Problem connecting to tracker -

HJ

[MCasillo]

I'd like to second the Bittorrent slowness. I'm able to connect to the tracker, but 1 seeder and 1 peer means it will take over 6 weeks to download at 4k/sec.

If you need a download site, message me and I'll give you space. I'd really like to try the appliance, but waiting over a week will be a very large deterrant for anyone.

[mubix]

I am currently developing a similar appliance. If you want you can email me or message me what you would like it to do.