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Concepts

What does your user need to understand about your project in order to use it.

    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).