If you think about it, letting the users run as admins shouldn't be a problem. Not if you have designed your network with zero trust in mind - assume every computer sits directly on the internet, assume everything is compromised.

So the only thing they should be able to screw up is their own computer - in which case you should be able to bring it back quickly with automation.

That said, I think developers need their own server(s). A test environment where they can create and destroy VMs and run containers and whatever else they need. Do development and run performance tests. Let them run wild in there. It could be cloud or on-prem or whetever it is they are developing.

@JaredBusch said in What Are You Watching Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Watching Now:

GhostBusters Trailer

As I mentioned in the other thread. fuck yeah. I love how they are making this an actual continuation with what happened before being a once off thing.

Great! Looking forward to that. The 2016 movie had some great people in it and a good director but for some reason it turned out to be rather mediocre. Not horrible but not something worth watching again. Hopefully this one will be better.

@biggen said in Getting started with automated provisioning?:

I’m not sure the difference between a clone and a copy. I’ll look that up.

It's just how the storage is handled.

Say that you have a debian install that uses 10GB. If you make a clone, the clone will also use the same 10GB of storage and only whatever blocks that it changes are stored separately. So if you make 9 clones maybe the entire 10 VMs will use a total of 11GB or something.

If you make a copy, the storage from the original VM is copied into a new but mostly identical 10GB. And the second another 10GB and so on. With a total of 10 VMs the total storage used are 100GB.

Clones are more frugal on storage but has more overhead so might be a little slower.
Clones use the same storage mechanism as snapshots while copied VMs are just a copy.

Practically speaking it's faster to work with clones but if you're cloning small VMs like minimal installs and have SSD disks the difference in time is small.

@biggen said in Getting started with automated provisioning?:

@Pete-S This is so helpful! Thank you very much.

I’m not sure the difference between a clone and a copy. I’ll look that up.

This seems much easier than having to create a vm from scratch using xo-cli. I guess using the xe commands means I’m running these directly on the host preferable from a Bash script when I get them working how I like?

Hey, you're welcome. Just happy to help out a colleague. Post your progress and we can all share!

You can run the command on the host over ssh or directly on it physically or inside xencenter aka xcp-ng center under the Console tab.

You can also run it on another machine if you have xe installed locally.
Using xe -s <hostname_or_ip> -u <username> -pw <password> whatever_commands_you_want_to_run
I don't know how to install xe on a generic server though. But you can use this command if you have a several independent xcp-ng hosts.

I just checked and you have two options to make a new VM with xe.

1. vm-clone (which makes a fast clone without actually copying the entire VM)
2. vm-copy (which makes a new VM by copying the old)

It takes care of the mac addr conflict automatically.

To try it run this on the host:

xe vm-clone new-name-label="clone" vm="base-install"

base-install would be the name of the VM you want to clone.
clone is the name of the new VM.

It's as easy as that.

If you want to make a full copy instead, just use vm-copy instead of vm-clone with the same options.

To start the VM after you created it:

xe vm-start vm="clone"

To shutdown the VM gracefully:

xe vm-shutdown vm="clone"

To remove the VM completely:

 xe vm-uninstall vm="clone" force=true

@biggen said in Getting started with automated provisioning?:

@Pete-S I may decide to work backwards on this. Learn the Ansible/Salt/Puppet/whatever part first. Get that down and then learn VM provisioning.

Although, cloning a base install sure sounds easier. How do you deal with hostname/MAC address conflicts with the clones?

I’ll check out that book. Thanks for the help!

I just clone the VM in xencenter (Copy VM) and it takes care of the VM name conflict and the MAC address conflict automatically.

The hostname inside the VM and then installing whatever additional stuff you need, has to be taken care of inside the VM after it has been booted up.

@biggen said in Getting started with automated provisioning?:

I'd imagine there are tons of examples using the built in xe tool I could find.

Yes, just look at Citrix documentation for xenserver. It's xe vm-install.

PS.

The pdf called Xenserver Virtual Machine Users Guide has the info you need in one place.
Look at Chapter 5. Creating Linux VMs
https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/legacy-archive/downloads/xs-vm-users-guide-7-5.pdf

For how to do thing on the host itself, it's the Administrators Guide pdf you want.
https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenserver/7-1/downloads/administrators-guide.pdf

I'm also looking to create VMs automagically and have the same setup (xcp-ng hosts, debian VMs).
Unfortunately I haven't had time yet so right now I just clone a base install and go from there.

BTW, I picked up the ebook Ansible for DevOps on leanpub for the Ansible part.

Go with xe instead. That is the native command line tool for xenserver/xcp-ng hosts and you run it on your host (or remotely).

Easiest is probably to create new VMs from a template.

If you want to automate debian install from scratch you need a preseed file.

Isn't stretching it extremely far to put Zoho among the major players?

Mayor players has to be Microsoft & Google. Then way down, common open source suites like libreoffice/openoffice. And then the rest, including Zoho.

Even compared to online suits only, Zoho can't have more than a few percent of the market if even that.