Proposing an alternative to AIMS

The current cumulative process of configuring AIMS to install a new machine is very labour and time intensive and requires significant configuration before any provisioning can take place. It has been suggested that there are more suitable alternatives available to AIMS and that further investigation needs to be undertaken to decide whether an alternative should/can be deployed.

• PXELINUX configuration required for each machine
• New distributions are labour intensive
• DHCP conf requires extensive configuration
• PXE menus are required to be produced manually (dist updates 4>5 requires manual amendment)
• kickstart per machine

Alternative Proposals

http://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LinuxSupport/AIMSAlternatives

Product Comparison

• Comparision looking at adding distributions, profiles (pointers to ks), systems
• Virtual provisioning
• Authentication (none)
• Adapability (Python API provided)

Issues Explored

Distribution/Image management

The management of distributions and their associated images is currently problematic with AIMS. Significant configuration is required by the linux team to make available new distributions.

• new configurations required
• boot menus require manual amendment

Cobbler provides a more simplistic, but still powerful, approach to the management of distributions. New distributions are easily added through the excution of the "cobbler distro add" command, combined with approproate name, kernel, initrd, arch amongst other options. See the CobblerManPage for more detail.

Support for Virtual Installations

Work is currently underway to allows Xen guests to be installed through AIMS. More information available from Jan Michael.

Cobbler already provides the nessessary infastructure for installing Dom0 and DomU

Development

PythonAPI available... to be expanded..

Work Plan

AIMSReplacementWorkPlan