Cobbler is a nice system to automate installations. Kind of management-tool, managing distros (centos, fedora, suse etc.), systems you want to deploy linux on, repositories to update the systems from and much more. These are my note on virtualizing cobbler with kvm. That way testing can be done on one host-computer w/ linux, speeding up the test-deployments with cobbler.

Using kvm to

• virtualize a cobbler-server
• deploy linux on other vms or real systems using the cobbler-server

Didnt completely virtualize all needed services in the cobbler-virtualmachine:

• the http-directory is served from the hosts linux, debian here.
• tftp-services are offered by the hosts linux, found tftp-transfers to be not possible between kvm virtualized machines

• host-linux - the system running on the bare metal, hosting the virtual machines
• cobbler, cobblermaster: the virtualized system running cobbler (including dhcp, http)
• cobblerclient: the virtualized or real system installed with linux by cobbler

• https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/ - the cobbler page
• step 1: kvmsetup - setting up kvm and preparing the host-linux system
• setp 2: cobblervm - setting up the cobblervm and needed services in it
• step 3: client - deploying linux on the first client-virtualmachine or real computer
• step 4: sles - some scripts for cobbler-deploying SuSE sles 9/10/11