Concepts

Forester is a bare-metal image-based unattended provisioning service for Red Hat Anaconda (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS Stream, Alma Linux…) with simplicity of configuration and use in mind. It utilizes Redfish API and PXE BIOS/EFI or UEFI-HTTP Boot to deploy images created by Image Builder through Anaconda.

Workflow

An example workflow for installation and operation.

Setup

The installation workflow:

• Start the service container
• Connect to servers via out of band management and enable Redfish
• Make sure the PXE/EFI-HTTP configuration is set up on the servers
• Configure DHCP to give clients forester IP address
• Add servers into Forester inventory (credentials and Redfish URL)

Operation

The provisioning workflow with Forester:

• Download or generate OS image with updates, user accounts, ssh keys and required configuration
• Upload the image into Forester
• Select a server from the inventory that is available
• Deploy an image to a server
• Release the server once it is ready to be reprovisioned again
• Repeat the process for new updated images

Talks (archive)

The following talks give a brief overview of Forester. Quick introduction to Forester for Red Hat Console Q3 Hackathon 2023:

Demo of Forester provisioning libvirt VMs (this is only useful for development purposes):

Full lightning talk from DevConf 2023 (poor audio quality).