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shaka
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Using vCO as kickstart/PXE front end?

Has anyone tried using vCO to be a front end for your ESXi PXE provisioning environment. I am looking at using the weboperator view to gather information from the Admin and then create the ks.cfg, DNS entry and DHCP reservation for the host.

For example it would collect:

Site (location)

Environment (Prod,Test..)

Hostname

IP info (IP, DNS, Gateway...)

MAC Address

Then based on lcoation and environment it would generate the ks.cfg file for the host, create the DNS entries and DHCP reservation.

Are there any examples out there to help get me started in the right direction?

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tschoergez
Leadership
Leadership

Can you use autodeploy? For that we have a plugin in vCO :slightly_smiling_face:

Anyway, I think the biggest challenge is not in vCO, but the logic to specify the kickstart files. Once you have pictured that, it's just rendering them in vCO JavaScript.

The kickstart files then can be placed to a TFTP server using the SSH/SCP Plugin (there are workflows for file transmission via SCP in the Library).

You might be able to re-engineer some of the kickstart generation logic used here: http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/

For the rest: That's straight forward: Create a workflow that has all the parameters you mentioned as input parameters, and use the values to fill them into the kickstart files.

Make a good useage of Configuration Elements (to define the list of available Sites, environments, ...) Configuration Elements revisited | VMware vCenter Orchestrator Blog - VMware Blogs and a Resource Element that contains the template for the kickstart file (Unable to Read XML File from vCO - Permission Denied).

Cheers,

Joerg