VA SystemImager

Linux use in corporations and research organizations has been growing at an amazing rate. It is often used on large numbers of identical systems serving as Internet server farms or high performance computing clusters. Without the help of specialized tools, the time and effort required to install and maintain large numbers of machines grows almost linearly as new systems are added. This creates the demand for a tool with the ability to automate the installation of new systems and maintain the software, configuration, and content of those systems on an ongoing basis. System administrators at large sites will often develop tools for automating the deployment and update of their own systems, but these tools are often very inflexible and are only designed to address the specific needs of one particular set of systems. Therefore these tools are often re-created by system administrators at site after site, not being able to capitalize on the work of their neighbors. The need was perceived for a tool that could provide this functionality at many different sites with different configurations. This required that the tool be easy to install, simple and straightforward to use, and that it be designed in an open and extensible manner to accommodate future changes and site specific customizations. This paper describes the resultant tool, VA SystemImager. It is Open Source software and is designed in a very modular manner. Great pains were taken to ensure that it would be flexible and could easily be modified to accommodate new hardware, software, and site specific configuration needs in future iterations. VA SystemImager is written mostly in Perl and makes use of rsync(1), syslinux(2), and pxelinux(2). It also required the creation of a customized miniature Linux distribution for the installation media. This paper will also discuss some of the differences between VA SystemImager and the KickStart network installation tool from RedHat. KickStart is the tool most often compared to VA SystemImager. Although there are a handful of other tools available, none of them offer the flexibility and ease of use of VA SystemImager.