I spent some time evaluating Fedora's Cobbler installation service. If you play with many machines - real or virtual - you should definitely take a look. Some handy features:
* Kickstart Setup: For Red Hat breed systems, existing Kickstart configurations (found on installation media) are exposed as profiles in Cobbler. You can add your own Kickstart configurations too (imagine a "rhel5-webserver" profile).
* PXE Management: Tied in with a DHCP server, cobbler will offer profiles up for installation for servers during PXE boot (often called Boot from network), since these profiles are tied with Kickstart configurations, servers can be setup or re-setup with just a few keystrokes. KVM seems to support PXE boots; less hoops for installation your VMs.
* Repository Mirroring: Cobbler can take the URL to a repository and mirror it locally, both yum and apt style repositories (rpm and deb) are supported. Use cobbler reposync to keep local mirrors up to date.
* Distribution Swallowing: Cobbler can copy installation media and copy it locally.
* Boot ISO / Live CD: If your server doesn't support PXE, or if tying into DHCP isn't an option, cobbler can make burnable ISOs (and thus USB thumb images) that can be used to perform network installs.
* MAC Address to Profile Management: Cobbler can associate a particular MAC address with a particular profile.
* Automatic Repository Setup: Cobbler can setup your local yum mirror in your newly created server automatically for you.
* Triggers / Puppet Integration: Cobbler can be configured to register the new machine with puppet, or run other triggers (imagine automatic graphs in Cacti, monitoring in OpsView, etc, etc).
* KOAN: Koan is a command line tool that talks with the Cobbler server. It can be used to set up new VMs (using libvirtd), or with a special --replace-self option, cause an existing installation to reinstall itself. (Only works with Red Hat breed systems.)
* Zeroconf: Avahi is among one of the coolest technologies I've played with recently. Specifying --server=DISCOVER on the koan command line will find the cobbler server on the network. I love stuff like that.
* Configuration Cloning: Move your test environment configuration into production (or mirror for HA, etc)
I really like the architecture of Cobbler too; an XMLRPC server that both the command line tools and web interface use. The web interface is handled by Apache and mod_python, so authentication and authorization are handled by Apache (ie, basically anything you can think of).
Lastly, one nice touch is cobbler check. Run right after a fresh install it checks your environment and lets you know of anything that could potentially hamper Cobbler from working.
I haven't yet tried Cobbler with an existing DHCP server, and I'm not sure it supports ISC DHCP's failover capabilities (even with OMAPI).
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