Hi All,
Are you interested in solving a general worldwide Lazy IT “problem”? (Zero-Touch Machine Control) or follow how the can get solved? Then continue reading! --Note to my knowledge there is no such software available. If so please comment details about the software i will check it out 
Intro:
I’m an system administrator for a company that educates in IT (Instructor-led courses) for all kinds of vendor’s such as Cisco, Citris, VMWare, Redhat, Microsoft and many more.
We try to avoid costs of “Virtual Labs” thus making our own (on instructions of vendor we re-build cloud OS machines, and deploy them on a powerful physical machine) images to deploy to classrooms. Our classrooms are high-end in IT hardware. You can imagine we have a (currently Altiris .gho files) huge library of images that we can deploy.
But every Friday when imaging to be ready for the new course starting next Monday we encounter “lazy IT problems” which increase our time we need to spend on restoring a lot of classrooms (multiple external locations, each location has multiple classrooms)
A default course is 5 days, we deploy corresponding images every Friday (after 17:00) to the systems. It’s a variation of images from Linux, to Windows Server editions that has Hyper-V with multiple images inside (Example: it will be used for a course Microsoft Domain Controller.).
Our “lazy IT problems” :
We want a bullet proof classroom, we want to fully control the classrooms systems. We want to be able to boot/shutdown, yes we have working WoL! But that diden’t solve our problem… <—Soooo many “We want” i know. Lazy…
Because Alot of courses use Hyper-V. Hyper-V breaks WoL 
It Hijacks NiC Ownership making WoL not work. We need to unplug/plug machine from power then WoL works untill it loads OS with Hyper-V again. That means we need to walk to the classrooms and/or ask the receptionist to boot up machines.
Idea!
Then i had one crazy idea to combine FOG with XCP-NG Server a.k.a (Citris Hypervisor, Xen-Server) ^0^. Wait what? What is XCP? It’s a free version of Xen-Server but with all features enabled for free.-> https://xcp-ng.org/
XCP-NG it not intended for classroom deployments… I know! But hear me out how i want to use the open-source combination to create a zero-touch deployment! even when Harddrive is wiped including the XCP-NG Host installation thus making us lose control of the machine! (I know it sounds insane, but bare with me a lot of typing is required to explain this!)
[XCP-NG limitations]:
*When XCP-NG Is installed it displayers the “Server console on screen”
First Dilemma: How do we serve end-user VM Guest screen instead of the console displayed on the image below?
Solution: vGPU Passthrough function, we stream the VM output to Graphic card. Attach Graphic card to VM Solved we see OS screen!
Second Dilemma: USB Port not working, mouse and keyboard not useable.
Solution: Almost same solution, but we use USB Passthrough, and there is another function to be able to hot mount/dismount usbs to vms. But for now we pre-configure usb passthrough.
Oke we now proofed that end-users can use the same fysical Guest VM machine where XCP-NG host is installed on LOL ;0
How do we recover XCP-NG Host if disk is formatted for any reason?
Well, my idea is we let the host machine boot by default on PXE and load our “customised” XCP-NG Netinstaller including answer file which includes the configuration.
I was planning on editing the netinstaller code to:
Check Disk -> Partition with XCP-NG Host Found?
----------------------- ^Yes -Boot from disk ^No -Start XCP-NG Host Netinstaller recovering XCP-NG Host.
Thus making it zero touch bulletproof, correct? We can fully use WoL or the XCP-NG tools*
*
- XCP-NG Center (Installer)
- Xen Orchenstra (Web-GUI)
- API Commands (FoG plugin if possible
to remote control it.
And what has FoG to do with it?
Well, FoG is insanely faster when pxe installing a VM than import and mounting the image file.
So i wanted to create a plugin for FoG to be able to send API commands to any XCP-NG Host to create an empty VM. When creating the vm template we can generate a MAC for the VM NiC& Boot it on PXE.
Because we generate the MAC in the template inside FoG webserver we can internally parse a deploy task for FoG targeting the guest Mac Address (That we generated when creating template) and install our classroom image.
What do i think we a achieve if this 100% works? First ever Zero-Touch Classroom Deployment.
–This workaround is pure for 1 thing! Hyper-V breaking WoL when Hyper-V is installed on host OS.
----If some one now comes with a solution to get WoL working on Hyper-V host machine i will fall off my chair.
So what do you think? I’m halfway with the PoC. Next step is to customize the net-installer to decide whether to reinstall or boot from disk.
Cheers!
Mokerhamer
