Server configuration management software/automation

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nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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Wondering if anyone here provisions bare metal and virtual servers automatically with software such as Chef/Puppet/Ansible?

I have been using Chef to provision development VMs for probably just over a little year now. But I'm now looking at managing my primary VMs and possibly even physical servers using Chef or similar.

Yesterday I came across Foreman (The Foreman which seems like a pretty neat tool for managing all of these things. Anyone used this?

Basically looking for any pointers in managing a small infrastructure easily as updating 10-20 VMs manually is a slight pain! :rolleyes:
 

capn_pineapple

Active Member
Aug 28, 2013
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ubuntu juju (MAAS), puppet, saltstack.... all good and useful, just need to know things like ip addresses/mac addresses or have access to OOB management in some cases.
 

Chuckleb

Moderator
Mar 5, 2013
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Minnesota
The world of provisioning is very wide and lots of loyalities. We are playing with Ansible and that is interesting. Puppet works, chef is good. Many have cheap/free licenses for small deployments that work for our test environments.
 

nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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Seems they all are free to some extent. It's when you want to have a central console to manage all of your nodes it starts to cost, but Foreman seems to eliminate that cost if I'm understanding this all correctly.
 

JustinH

Active Member
Jan 21, 2015
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As a central console, I've been using rundeck. You can use it to execute command line programs on servers, or as a fancy cron replacement. Supports both *nix and Windows. (Via WinRM). It's a nice compliment to Chef/Puppet etc when you don't want to write a playbook/recipe or just execute a few adhoc commands quickly on a group of servers. Web based GUI and some command line interfaces as well.
 

nry

Active Member
Feb 22, 2013
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That looks really good, thanks :)

Need to find some time to play with all of these things!
 

TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
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Seems they all are free to some extent. It's when you want to have a central console to manage all of your nodes it starts to cost, but Foreman seems to eliminate that cost if I'm understanding this all correctly.
Puppet is free for an unlimited number of nodes, but doesn't have much of a web GUI to oversee it all. Puppet Enterprise (costs $) adds a web dashboard, but there are other options if you want to stay with a free solution. Puppet Dashboard is free, but hasn't seen any updates in quite a long time. Foreman also works as a web front-end to puppet and imho is better at it than the old puppet dashboard (which I used to run), and also provides a lot more functionality for provisioning machines from scratch. Foreman will take you from just an account on a cloud service (could be your own private vmware or other cluster) and automatically create/boot/os-install/etc. a VM to the point where the puppet agent can run on the new node, then foreman lets puppet do its thing and becomes your interface to puppet.

One other product I use that hasn't been mentioned here yet is Spacewalk, which is a patch-management solution for RPM-based linux distro's. It is the open-source upstream version of RedHat's satellite product, at least for versions of satellite before 6. In addition to being a local mirror of all the repo's I need to keep all my boxes up to date I also modified my foreman provisioning to use the local spacewalk server for its media source - fully automated installs are now faster than copying vmware templates here. Starting with Satellite 6 redhat has moved over to a new platform, the free upstream version is Katello - Katello is pulling together puppet and foreman and also adding pulp to be a single tool for provisioning, change-management, and patch/package-management.
 

Chuckleb

Moderator
Mar 5, 2013
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Minnesota
I tried to get Spacewalk to run, it was previously complicated and messy. I saw the new route but hasn't had time to explore... Definitely interesting if you are in the Redhat family.