Using Koan; Using Koan To Provision Virtual Systems - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 Reference Manual

Chapter 11. Cobbler
Kickstart snippets are sections of kickstart code that can be called by a $SNIPPET() function that will
be parsed by Cobbler and substitute that function call with the contents of the snippet.
For example, if you had a common hard drive partition configuration for all servers, such as:
clearpart --all
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=150 --asprimary
part / --fstype ext3 --size=40000 --asprimary
part swap --recommended
part pv.00 --size=1 --grow
volgroup vg00 pv.00
logvol /var --name=var vgname=vg00 --fstype ext3 --size=5000
You could take that snippet, save it to a file (such as my_partition), and place the file in /var/
lib/cobbler/snippets/ so that Cobbler can access them.
You can then use the snippet by using the $SNIPPET() function in your kickstart templates. For
example:
$SNIPPET('my_partition')
Wherever you invoke that function, the Cheetah parser will substitute the function with the snippet of
code contained in the my_partition file.
For more information about kickstart snippets, refer to the Cobbler project page at the following URL:
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartSnippets

11.6. Using Koan

Whether you are provisioning guests on a virtual machine or reinstalling a new distribution on a
running system, koan works in conjunction with Cobbler to provision systems on the fly.

11.6.1. Using Koan to Provision Virtual Systems

Section 11.3, "Adding a Profile to
If you have created a virtual machine profile as documented in
Cobbler", you can use koan to initiate the installation of a virtual guest on a system.
For example, say you've created a Cobbler profile such as the following:
cobbler add profile --name=virtualfileserver --distro=rhel-i386-server-5 --
virt-file-size=20 --virt-ram=1000
This profile is for a fileserver running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with a 20GB guest image size and
alloted 1GB of system RAM.
To find the name of the virtual guest system profile, run the following with koan:
202