I, like most people spend a huge amount of time doing boring and mundane things.
This leads to procrastination in avoiding those tasks – which is dangerous for those of us of a certain disposition as it normally leads to something destructive.
So I needed to rebuild my home lab, because I may or may not have again changed my mind on how I wanted to lay things out.
This immediately brings annoyance to my life because it means I need to go install the hypervisor again and set my life up which takes hours and I normally lose interest and don’t achieve what I wanted to do in the first place.
In comes my friend Jeroen (a fellow chaos creator) who has channelled the boring and mundane tasks into his new project CE Deployer which is a bit clever.
Prep work:
I’d recently moved some storage disks around my nodes so a fresh install was needed, but CE Node Inspector comes along that allows me to boot a small ISO and get the lie of the land before I move on. This took a small number of minutes even on my dodgy iDRAC network.
This thing of beauty awaited me on each node telling me I was in for a good time ahead; reminding me I should wipe my disks before we go to play.
I was able to then create an Installation (think of this like a profile) for the host which generates a unique ISO.
The installation takes the disk names identified from the CE Node Inspector, IP addresses, cluster details and even offers to deploy Prism Central for you.
The best thing is that the ISO is much smaller than the kitchen sink CE installer – because the host once booting the CE deployer generated ISO pulls down AOS+AHV from the server running CE Deployer. This is very useful because it runs over the LAN rather than the traditionally iffy out of band console.
Much quicker, even over my wireless bridge to the Lab:)
A short while later my little CE 1-node cluster was delivered.
I am fortunate to be seeing Jeroen in a few weeks time and will be buying him a coffee to thank him for saving my sanity a bit. (and I’ll be asking for some feature requests too ;))
I’d like to have the ability to automate the install but not create the cluster for example, so when I rebuild my 3 node cluster I can use CE Deployer, and embed an SSH public key during deploy for cluster lockdown..
What other cool stuff could CE Deployer do for us? 🙂 In the meantime check out Jeroen’s full video showing the magic in action – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te2IrT90-Rs