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How to Create Hardware Independent Server Images to deploy more servers.
Hello All,
need some guidance and advise to be able to create Hardware independent images of CentOS and Debian Images that I can deploy to any Dedicated or KVM VPSs.
I've been using this scenario for my windows servers from long, but have no expeirence with Linux, and would need some good reliable solutions. How will network cards and other hardware be probed and handled from the images ?
In-Short, what I need is bare-metal recovery images that can be deployed to any platform - Cloud/KVM/Dedicated to spin up a server in minutes.
Thanked by 1GM2015
Comments
you should be able to get all necessary guidance from your virtualization manager documentation.
Typically the best way I have seen is to have a base OS template in which your orchestration manager gets installed (puppet,chef,ansible). Then the orchestration manager handles the rest of the configuration.
Though if you are referring to just a standard OS image and not software configuration most hardware is detected or scanned on boot. Could also do kickstart scripts, single run scripts on startup etc.
I would recommend Docker. It's not an OS image you can set up as a system on VPS, but rather a container system you can use to deploy app environment without OS dependencies.
Some hosting providers deploy dedicated OS reinstall templates via kickstart
Interesting pointers here. Though I'm not convinced with the solutions mentioned as they depend on the Architecture and Platform (using Docker/Ansible/Virt. Snapshot features etc.)
What I'm looking at is a Generic ISO/Qemu image that can be deployed straight between different environments, for Eg: AWS EC2 to Ramnode KVM to an OpenVZ and back to a Dedicated Server.
On Windows we have sysprep which removes the HAL and generalizes a user profile to be deployed as a "Kickstart" or base profile and have the OS installation rolled up with software and customization.
I guess Kickstart is the one for that equivalent, can you point me to some good guides for it ? or is it not ?
http://how-to.linuxcareer.com/automating-linux-installations-with-kickstart
You can use kickstart for centos
http://www.tecmint.com/multiple-centos-installations-using-kickstart/
Thanks @mgilang & @doughmanes
I learnt that these tools work for specific distros.
Will be giving them a study!