Initial tooling for host provisioning

[oranenj]

With the first hardware servers getting set up, I've been playing around with kickstart and PXE to help get the first servers provisioned. It's probably a good idea to have an issue about it.

In #5 I have an initial kickstart thingy underway, and I also have some beginning of a PXE server automation in a separate branch.

The initial goal ought to be to provide just enough to get basic CentOS 8.3 hosts running so that Ansible can take over.

[jkwong]

Just curious if you are familiar with Cobbler if this would be a better fit. https://github.com/Cobbler/Cobbler

[NeilHanlon]

Cobbler is kinda ancient now I feel. We could go with a foreman and/or Katello.

[SherifNagy]

My vote is for foreman, pretty easy to setup and very modular, and I know it has"puppet" build in, but you don't have to use ;)

[oranenj]

I'm not going to implement either foreman or cobbler within this pull request though :P Its point is to just have something that can create VMs to get things started.

[elreydetoda]

Since this is labeled as Future Ideas 🙂

Has anyone heard of tinkerbell? It is essentially taking a modern container approach to the pxe/initial provisioning process.

I honestly haven't personally set it up in prod, but one of my projects (that I hope to get to soon) is to start evaluating something like that.

The people over at @packethost are pretty OSS friendly as well, and might be amenable to help?

They also have a YT channel as well if anyone has time to watch they have a 101 video and also an indepth video.

I wish I had more time and could get something up and running as a demo, but I have a lot going on right now.