10 capturing and deploying linux images, 1 overview of capturing and deploying linux images – HP Insight Control Software for Linux User Manual

Page 104

Advertising
background image

10 Capturing and deploying Linux images

This chapter addresses the following topics:

“Overview of capturing and deploying Linux images ” (page 104)

“Prerequisites to capturing a Linux image” (page 106)

“Capturing a Linux image from a managed system” (page 109)

“Preparing for scalable deployment” (page 110)

“Deploying a captured Linux image to one or more managed system” (page 113)

“Insight Control for Linux partition wizard overview” (page 116)

10.1 Overview of capturing and deploying Linux images

NOTES:

Insight Control for Linux does not support capture and deployment of:

VMware ESX or VMware ESXi host images

RHEL 6 systems installed with Software RAID

SLES 10 systems installed with Software RAID

The

RAM disk

hardware discovery operation presents the SMART ARRAY controllers in a

different order from the hardware discovery method in the SLES 10 SP3 operating system,
which can result in a deploy operation writing the OS image to the wrong disk.

If two or more systems are sharing a SAN, any deployment operation attempts to re-create
the partitions on the SAN. Insight Control for Linux does not preserve them; even SANs mounted
as permanent data disks would be recreated.

The Deploy

→Operating System menu provides the ability for you to capture a Linux image from

a

managed system

and deploy that image to one or more target managed systems.

IMPORTANT:

Captured images are stored in a directory accessible through a web server interface

that allows anonymous access; captured images are deployed using SSH. Therefore, any user on
the network can retrieve captured images in the Insight Control for Linux

repository

. HP recommends

that captured images do not contain confidential data if the network is untrusted.

Insight Control for Linux supports options that allow you to adjust and customize captured and
deployed images.

For information on scripts that you can use before and after capturing a Linux image, see

Section 10.1.2 (page 105)

and

Section 10.1.3 (page 106)

.

Capturing a Linux image is useful if you want to replicate the OS environment from one managed
system to one or more managed systems to maintain a consistent environment on all managed
systems.

The capture operation reboots the managed system where the image is captured to the Insight
Control for Linux RAM disk environment. After the OS image is captured, the system is rebooted
back to its installed OS.

The Insight Control for Linux image deployment tool provides an integrated Partition Wizard to
enable you to modify the deployed images disk layout, file system selection, and logical volumes.

Using the Partition Wizard during image deployment requires an in-depth understanding of Linux,
kernel modules, and the grub boot loader.

104 Capturing and deploying Linux images

Advertising