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Chapter 8. Provisioning Hosts Using a PXE-less Discovery Image

Satellite provides two main approaches to provisioning hosts, PXE booting and boot disk provisioning. Boot disk provisioning, or PXE-less booting, provides host provisioning when PXE services are not available. This guide covers PXE-less host provisioning.

You can use the Discovery image ISO to boot either bare metal hardware or virtual systems and attach them to the Satellite Server. Both DHCP and static IP networking are supported. The Discovery Plug-ins are installed by default and are a part of the subscribed repository.

  1. Verify that your Satellite Server has a compatible version of the discovery plug-ins.

    • Discovery plug-in - tfm-rubygem-foreman_discovery-5.0.0.4-1 or later
    • Discovery image - foreman-discovery-image-3.4.4-5 or later
    • Smart proxy plug-in - rubygem-smart_proxy_discovery-1.0.3-2 or later

      If you need to upgrade the plug-ins, you must reboot.

  2. For physical systems, transfer the ISO image onto a USB stick or CDROM/DVD. For virtual systems, attach the ISO image to a virtual CD-ROM.
  3. Boot the ISO image on your system.

    A text-based user interface appears.

  4. Select either Manual network setup or Discover with DHCP, depending on your environment.
  5. If the host has multiple NICs, choose the primary network interface and click Select.
  6. If applicable, enter your network credentials and click Next.
  7. Enter the full Satellite Server URL and select the Server connection type. Click Next.
  8. Enter custom facts to trigger auto-provisioning rules and click Confirm.

    The host is discovered and sends a "discovery_kexec" fact to Satellite Server that prevents a reboot during provisioning.

  9. In the web UI, go to HostsDiscovered Hosts to view the host.
  10. Click Provision, enter the information for your host and click Submit.