On 5 September 2017 at 15:24, Stu Midgley <sdm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Morning everyone > > I am in the process of redeveloping our cluster deployment and config > management environment and wondered what others are doing? > > First, everything we currently have is basically home-grown. > > Our cluster deployment is a system that I've developed over the years and > is pretty simple - if you know BASH and how pxe booting works. It has > everything from setting the correct parameters in the bios, zfs ram disks > for the OS, lustre for state files (usually in /var) - all in the initrd. > > We use it to boot cluster nodes, lustre servers, misc servers and desktops. > > We basically treat everything like a cluster. > > However... we do have a proliferation of images... and all need to be kept > up-to-date and managed. Most of the changes from one image to the next are > config files. > > We don't have a good config management (which might, hopefully, reduce the > number of images we need). We tried puppet, but it seems everyone hates > it. Its too complicated? Not the right tool? > > I was thinking of using git for config files, dumping a list of rpm's, > dumping the active services from systemd and somehow munging all that > together in the initrd. ie. git checkout the server to get config files > and systemctl enable/start the appropriate services etc. > > It started to get complicated. > > Any feedback/experiences appreciated. What works well? What doesn't? >
We are a small installation, with manageable needs. In our first step up from where you are, we ended up on: - Katello/Foreman (in RedHat it's called Satellite) for management of software repositories, in discrete sets and slices. We started with Spacewalk but it is a little old and fusty and just isn't appropriate anymore. - git for config management of environment module files - Ansible for easy day to day management of servers We no longer manage configs as such, since there is a shared data store, and the Ansible/Katello mix means we can rebuild any server from scratch. Note that Ansible and Katello/Foreman can be integrated - we haven't gone that far yet. Are quite happy with the two being apart. That will change in the near future I think. Cheers L. ------ "The antidote to apocalypticism is *apocalyptic civics*. Apocalyptic civics is the insistence that we cannot ignore the truth, nor should we panic about it. It is a shared consciousness that our institutions have failed and our ecosystem is collapsing, yet we are still here — and we are creative agents who can shape our destinies. Apocalyptic civics is the conviction that the only way out is through, and the only way through is together. " *Greg Bloom* @greggish https://twitter.com/greggish/status/873177525903609857
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