Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows you to quickly set up a network installation environment.
Cobbler can provision systems using PXE, media-based net installations, virtualized installations (supporting Xen, QEMU, KVM and VMWare Server), according to various defined distributions and profiles. A distribution in this case is a Linux Distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or openSUSE, including it's version number, and a profile indicates what the target system should look like (webserver, fileserver, desktop, ...). Besides these aspects of provisioning systems, it can also help managing the infrastructure needed to deploy Linux; DHCP and DNS, as well as the TFTP directories for PXE environments.
With all that comes a nice web interface you can use for administration, including delegation of tasks.
In this workshop, we will use PXE to provision systems. Using PXE has a few prerequisites, but results in the most efficient and thus beneficial provisioning environment. A very minimal PXE environment would have at least one DHCP server and at least one TFTP server. With these two servers, any system can boot anything offered by the TFTP server (provided the offered materials are compatible with the system, of course).
In order to be able to deploy Linux though, there's a few additional requirements to the PXE environment:
If a system is to boot an installation procedure, the installation procedure itself may need additional files to perform the installation.
For automated installations (true provisioning), if the installation procedure is supposed to get a couple of answers to questions it might have, it will need these answers one way or the other (kickstart, preseed, autoyast).
