What is best approach for a hands-free install?
 

I'm developing a system that will need to create VMs on the fly programmatically. The create process has to be completely hands-free, so the typical step-by-step wizard isn't an option. What's the best approach to creating a hands-free Linux install? We haven't decided on a specific distro to use but it will likely be CentOS. I read about Kickstart and that might suit our needs, but I was wondering if there are other options?

If Slackware is an option for you, read this from AlienBOB aka Eric Hameleers. If it's not exactly what you want, you could adapt according to your needs.

EDIT Oh, and I almost forgot: welcome to LQ.

Thanks Didier. I think I'm going to like LQ a lot. It's breadth is amazing and the forums appear to be very active.

We hadn't considered Slackware up until now. Not sure if this ssh install feature would do what we need; I'll have to experiment. We'll likely end up building our own .img or .iso file and pass that to virt-install. The trick is to have the subsequent install of the OS to as fast as possible and completely hands-free.

That's why CentOS (RHEL based, like Scientific Linux, Fedora..) has kickstart, example ks.

I would go for Kickstart (Red Hat based), Preseed (Debian based) or, if all the VMs are the same, just cloning a harddisk-image that has the OS on it.

The VMs will in fact be largely identical. The only thing that will vary is the amount of swap space allocated to the VM, and for that reason I was thinking a pre-installed .img file might be the best option. I've done this exact sort of thing with FreeBSD. I'll have to investigate the same idea for CentOS.