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At work, I'm in charge of putting together two "massive" VMWare servers for developers, QA and tech support. These servers will be duplicates of each other and are using the free version of VMWare server.
Each server will have 5 VMWare guest installations of every operating system we support, not counting MS Windows. That's about 15 - 20 different *nix operating systems, multiplied by 5. Each install consists of the following:
- A clean install - only the os
- CURRENT release of our software
- RELEASE version of our software
- EDGE version of our software
- BETA version of our software
Now, VMWare images are comprised of text and binary files. The text files contain primarily configuration data. This means, after a clean install, I copy the files to a new directory, modify the config data, and fire up the guest to isntall our software. Stil, this is very repetitive.
The past few days, I put together a script, now working, to automate this. It does the copying and the config modification. However, I knew I could go further so I altered it to generate a new blank guest image a configure it to use an iso file for the CD. For RedHat based systems, it maps a floppy image with a kickstart file to the floppy drive.
My goal is to automate 80-95% of the process and make it so an entire new image can be created with a click of a button. Once I get that done, I'll make a web interface.
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