Koan with ISO’s

While most of Cobbler installing is about enabling scripted network installation, can also define image objects which track ISOs that Koan can find and see. Currently this only works when using Koan with QEMU/KVM for installation (sorry, no Xen or VMware support yet). This can be used, for instance, to install Windows via Koan.

For this to work best, the ISO must be available by the same NFS path on all hosts. It need not be mounted and Cobbler nor Koan will copy it.

cobbler image add --name=image_name --file=nfs://hostname.example.org:/path/example/acme-os-installer-image.iso [--virt-ram=512] [--virt-file-size=10] [...etc...]

And on the Koan side, just run:

koan --list=images --server=cobbler.example.org
koan --virt --image=image_name --server=cobbler.example.org

Koan will then mount the NFS location and begin a fully virtualized installation using the virtual metadata and info stored in Cobbler.

You may remember that Cobbler has objects like “distros” and “profiles”. Images are another type of object, but act similarly.

System objects in Cobbler may also attach to an image instead of a profile, though not all attributes of the system apply to an image – for instance, we may care about the number of interfaces, but the networking configuration automagic that normally happens as part of a kickstart can’t happen for an image based install.

Avoid image based installs if at all possible – use kickstart where you can, and images for foreign content where you can not.