Mass Deployment

Of course, all this is tied up in the broader question of provisioning infrastructure and higher-level tools like Kickstart, SystemImager, and so on. Xen amplifies the problem by increasing the number of servers you own exponentially and making it easy and quick to bring another server online. That means you now need the ability to automatically deploy lots of hosts.

Manual Deployment

The most basic approach (analogous to tarring up a filesystem) is probably to build a single tarball using any of the methods we've discussed and then make a script that partitions, formats, and mounts each domU file and then extracts the tarball.

For example:

#!/bin/bash LVNAME=$1 lvcreate -C y -L 1024 -n ${LVNAME} lvmdisk parted /dev/lvmdisk/${LVNAME} ...

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