cobbler koan?

[DrewEinhorn]

Looking for a way to install and configure RHEL/CentOS boxes all the

way through kickstarting an OS install for a particular flavor VM.

cobbler/koan looks really nice, it was built for Xen virtualization,

but I wonder if anyone has looked at how much trouble

to port koan for the ESX infrastructure.

Or does anybody know of other tools that provide similar capabilities

in the ESX wrrold.

For now I'm trying to just use the non virtualization pieces of cobbler.

Seems like the first thing I need to do is create a VM with a specific

MAC address. Found a knowledgebase article.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/507

It talks about making modifications to a text virtual machine configuration file.

But it doesn't tell me where the configuration file is.

sshing into the ESX server I find:

/vmfs/volumes/.vmx

This looks like the place to set

ethernetN.address

ethernetN.addressType

Hmm, is there documentation on manually configuring .vmx files?

Message was edited by:

ken.cline@hp.com to shorten the URL

[Ken_Cline]

Have you looked at the Ultimate Deployment Appliance[/url]?

The UDA homepage: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=366

The appliance, in Workstation format: http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/

[peetz]

You can "edit" the vmx-file of a VM trough the VI client. Look at

"Edit settings..." -> "Options" tab -> Select the "Advanced" row on the left -> click on the "Configuration Parameters..." button on the right.

You will then get a table of parameter names and values where you can add rows like "ethernet0.address" or "ethernet0.addressType".

However, this can only be done when the VM is powered off.

\- Andreas