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Automate CentOS and RHEL installation with PXE
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Extensive frameworks for Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt are found in many setups for both automation and configuration. What happens once a system is installed and accessible over SSH is clearly defined by these frameworks, so how do you convince a computer to transition to this state? Several tool suites deal with the topic of bare metal deployment in different ways; the installation of the operating system, then, is part of a large task package that the respective software processes, as if by magic.
Not everyone wants the overhead of such solutions, but that doesn't mean you have to sacrifice convenience. Linux systems can usually be installed automatically by onboard resources, without a framework or complex abstraction. In this article, I show how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, and by analogy CentOS) can be installed automatically by the normal tools of a Linux distribution with a preboot execution environment (PXE). All of the tasks in the deployment chain are addressed.
Initial State
To install the other systems automatically, you clearly require something like a manually installed nucleus. These systems are often referred to as bootstrap nodes or cluster workstations. Essentially, this is all about the infrastructure that enables the automatic installation of Red Hat or CentOS, although it does not include as many services as you might expect. All that is really needed is working name resolution, DHCP, trivial FTP (TFTP), and an HTTP server that provides the required files. If desired, Chrony or Ntpd can be added so that the freshly rolled out servers have the correct time.
In this article, I assume that all services for the operation of an automatic installation framework are running on one system. Ideally, this is a virtual machine (VM) that runs on a high-availability cluster for redundancy reasons. This setup can be easily realized on Linux with onboard resources by a
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