The last few posts I’ve been mentioning how much of the configuration for my ESX hosts is automated. This post I’m going to talk a little more about how that automation is done, and provide an example kickstart script. I have been holding off on this post for a while now, as I have been planning on rebuilding my PXE server, at which point I will document each step and be able to provide a much more detailed post. However, things keep getting in the way and I haven’t had time to rebuild the server yet, so this is a slightly less detailed post, but should still be enough to get you on your way 🙂 And I have no doubt that you, dear reader, are not afraid of asking questions in the comments…
This automation is currently handled (I say “currently” because I’m working to move the majority of it to a remote host and use the SDK) by kickstart when the system is loaded. Well, to be totally honest, kickstart only plays a partial role in the process…during the %post section of kickstart I copy a series of scripts from an NFS mount point into the startup process (/etc/init.d/rc3.d), which are executed at first boot and, like good one-time-only scripts, remove themselves.
This setup allows me to pxe boot a host, give it the boot command which has the host ID appended, and that’s it. I can then walk away and wait for the host to add itself to vCenter, indicating that it’s finished. Kickstart and the post install scripts then configure the hostname, ip, virtual network configuration, security policy, ntp, base user set, install any custom RPMs, etc. This makes it extremely easy for me to keep all of our hosts at the same configuration level.
In order to keep all the hosts the same I simply have to update the relevant post install script when we decide to make a global change and it will configure the host correctly the next time it is loaded/reloaded. For updating hosts that can’t be reloaded (I try to reload the hosts periodically with the newest binaries from VMware…every 4-6 months…so that the software is not a huge conglomeration of patches…I know, it’s unnecessary, but it gives me peace of mind) we use a combination of Glenn’s POSH prowess and the perl toolkit scripts I’ve created to remediate hosts en masse to our baseline configuration.
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