Developing and maintaining a rapidly deployable image of an installed system

[Greg Larkin]

Bill Moran wrote:
[...]
> 
> The host system is a very basic install -- mostly just give it an IP and
> add users for the administrators.  All the ports and details of their
> configs are in the individual jails.  It's much more efficient than using
> something like VMware, which has horrific performance penalties.
> 

Hi Bill,

We've been using VMware with FreeBSD guests for a few years now without
any performance problems. In fact, jails even work well within a FreeBSD
VM.  What kinds of problems have you run into?

Responding to the original question, we solved it by creating a FreeBSD
VM and storing it as a template in VMware VirtualCenter.  Whenever a new
VM is needed, the template is deployed and customized with memory, extra
disk space, IP address, etc.

You can take it further by implementing a tool like Puppet, cfengine or
Chef to perform the post-deployment configuration and keep the various
recipe files under source control:

http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/ (in the ports tree)
http://www.cfengine.org/ (in the ports tree)
http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home (not in the ports tree)

Cheers,
Greg

-- 
Greg Larkin
http://www.FreeBSD.org/
http://twitter.com/sourcehosting