Introducing support for Rackspace and Debian pre-seed

08/08/2012 - Laurent Eschenauer (@eschnou)

Over the last weeks, we have been working on extending ComodIT support of cloud providers and operating systems.
Today we are happy to announce support for Rackspace Cloud Servers (both first and next-gen) and support for unattended install of Debian using preseed (yes, even on Rackspace and Amazon EC2). In addition, we are also releasing a couple of bug fixes and improving the user experience based on the great feedback received during our ongoing private beta.

If you are already a ComodIT user, thank you for your help in testing and improving our service. Do not hesitate to ping us an email at support@comodit.com if you need help or have feedback for us. If you are still waiting for an invite, dont’t worry, we’ll release a new batch in the coming days.

Rackspace first & next generation cloud servers

We have prepared a tutorial to help you get started. Please reach out to us if you get into trouble following this tutorial. In summary, the key features of our Rackspace integration are:

• Support first and next generation cloud servers
• Create and manage servers directly from ComodIT
• Inject user-data script to be executed on first launch
• Provision your Linux server via kickstart (RedHat/CentOS) or preseed (Debian/Ubuntu)

As you see, the goal of ComodIT is not to be a complete replacement of the Rackspace UI. Instead we focus on our key added value, such as the server provisioning via kickstart/preseed and the ability to chain into our configuration management engine. Finally, ComodIT provides you with a ‘single pane of glass’ to manage all your servers, applications, and their configurations.

This also means that you can use the same distribution and application templates accross cloud providers, seamlessly re-provisioning a complete infrastructure from EC2 to Rackspace or your local VMWare/Xen/KVM environment and vice-versa.

Unattended install of Debian-like distribution using preseed

If you ever had to prepare a Cloud Image for Rackspace or Amazon EC2, you know how tedious and time consuming the process can be. Life would be much easier if you could simply ‘install’ your cloud server just like you would install a physical or virtual machine from an ISO or the net. Well, ComodIT enables you to do just that. Just point to an install kernel/initrd and you can execute an install on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace. You can even perform an interactive install via VNC, all within the ComodIT UI. This tutorial will guide you through installing a CentOS 6.3 on Amazon EC2.

We have now introduced the complete support for Debian preseed format. Which enable you to perform the same kind of unattended install on Rackspace and EC2. You need to be familiar with the preseed concept. To get you started, we provide a generic preseed file in our examples. It has been tested with Debian ‘squeeze’ on both Amazon EC2 and Rackspace first/next generation cloud servers.