Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Minor
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Resolution: Won't Fix
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2.0
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None
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None
Description
After a user creates a new image, that user can create a reservation for the image without having to configure any groups or mappings. This is a good thing. The image is automatically configured to be a member of the 'newimages-<username>-<user id>' group. The 'newimages*' image groups are mapped to the 'newimages' computer group. As a result, reservations for new images will be assigned computers in the newimages computer group.
Although this usually works fine, the automatic mapping to the fixed computer group could result in an image failing to load because the computers in the group may contain different hardware than the image was created on.
A different management node may also be assigned than the one the image was created on. This could also result in an image failing to load if the management node is running different code which doesn't support the image or configured in a way which doesn't support the new image. This may also cause wasted image repository space if the user quickly discards the image because the image would be copied to additional management nodes.
This issue was created after encountering a limitation while I was creating the initial Vista base image. I needed to allow other users to create derivative image from the base image but wanted all derivative images to run from the same management node. At the time, only 1 management node fully supported the Vista code and code updates were being made frequently as the bugs were worked out. Because of this issue, other users' Vista images would attempt to load on other management nodes and fail.
It may be beneficial to at least limit new images to the same management node that they were created on until specific image grouping is configured for the image. It would be much more difficult to have new images only run on the same hardware.
One possibility may be to have a management node to module mapping. As more and more components are modularized, we could achieve greater flexibility if management nodes could be configured to support certain modules. In this example, I would have simply had to map the Vista module to the management node which supported the code and added some computers to the newimages computer group.