This is a guest OS definition for Ganeti. It will communicate with Cobbler to create an instance based on a profile defined in Cobbler. This only works if you already have Cobbler already installed and accessible from the node where the Ganeti instance will run.
In order to install this package from source, you need to determine what options ganeti itself has been configured with. If ganeti was built directly from source, then the only place it looks for OS definitions is /srv/ganeti/os, and you need to install the OS under it:
./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--with-os-dir=/srv/ganeti/os
make && make install
If ganeti was installed from a package, its default OS path should already include /usr/share/ganeti/os, so you can just run::
./configure -prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var \
--sysconfdir=/etc
make && make install
Note that you need to repeat this procedure on all nodes of the cluster.
The actual path that ganeti has been installed with can be determined by looking for a file named _autoconf.py under a ganeti directory in the python modules tree (e.g. /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ganeti/_autoconf.py). In this file, a variable named OS_SEARCH_PATH will list all the directories in which ganeti will look for OS definitions.
The kind of instance created can be customized via a settings file. This file may or may not be installed by default, as the instance creation will work without it. The creation scripts will look for it in $sysconfdir/default/ganeti-instance-cobbler, so if you have run configure with the parameter --sysconfdir=/etc, the final filename will be /etc/default/ganeti-instance-cobbler.
The following settings will be examined in this file (see also the file named 'defaults' in the source distribution for more details):
- COBBLER_SERVER: The name of the server that cobbler runs on. The URL http:///cobbler_api must be accessible from the node the instance will be created on.
- COBBLER_PROFILE: The name of the Cobbler profile to base the instance on.
- COBBLER_USER: The name of the user to authenticate as for XMLRPC interaction with cobler. You can opt to not authenticate as a user, but you will be unable to set the netboot_enabled flag for a new system. This means the instance will not pxeboot and kickstart. If you do not want to authenticate, you must set register_new_installs: 1 in /etc/cobbler/settings.
- COBBLER_PASS: The password for the cobbler user to authenticate as.
Note that the settings file is important on the node that the instance is installed on, not the cluster master. This is indeed not a very good model of using this OS but currently the OS interface in ganeti is limiting.
Further, please note that installation via cobbler will require that the instance boot from the network for the first time. The hypervisor's boot_order can be set accordingly when creating the instance or changed after install.
All customization of the instance should be configured in Cobbler. This ganeti os definition does not support direct customization of the instance. There are other tools better suited for that job, including Cobbler.
All customization of the instance is done by Cobbler. Cobbler accomplishes this with templating, snippets, and other measures. When creating the instance, the hypervisor parameter boot_order should be set so that the instance will boot from the network. One possible configuration would be: boot_order=cn. This would try to boot from the disk first and then from the network.