Plugins » Discovery

This could evolve into Virt-builder Compute Resource provider and Smart Proxy plugin creating images for discovered hosts (and also for Virt/Cloud providers). Virt-builder tool does work also on virtualized instances, so no bare-metal is needed to build customized images.

It looks like other tools take similar approach in image-based bare-metal provisioning.

CloneZilla, DRBL, FogProject all use UDPCast to trasnfer the images (http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/bootdoc.html) which looks promising. It transfers via UDP (faster than TCP usually) and it offers multicast shipping (also interesting feature) and also it is linked with lzop library which provides faster but still good compression for the transmission.

I should take a look how Triple-O does the imaging, I've heard from Ohad its a different approach via iSCSI.

For the record, TripleO does use an iSCSI: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/deploy/user-guide.html#understanding-bare-metal-deployment

"""
The DHCP boots the deploy ramdisk. The PXE driver actually copies the image over iSCSI to the physical node. It connects to the iSCSI end point, partitions volume, “dd” the image and closes the iSCSI connection. The deployment is done. The Ironic conductor will switch pxe config to service mode and notify ramdisk agent on the successful deployment.
"""