I am a little new to managing large numbers of CentOS/RHEL servers and was wondering what you experienced sysadmins prefer, Spacewalk or Puppet?
Thanks,
Dan Burkland
I am a little new to managing large numbers of CentOS/RHEL servers and was wondering what you experienced sysadmins prefer, Spacewalk or Puppet?
If you look at recent posts, you'll know my opinion of Spacewalk (not high, for large values of "not", and small values of "high").
mark
Mark,
What would you recommend for a larger environment then?
Dan Burkland NMDP Helpdesk Technician 3001 Broadway Street N. E. Suite 100, Minneapolis, MN 55413-1753
Phone (612) 362-3411 Toll Free: (800) 526-7809 Ext. 8123
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of m.roth@5-cent.us Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 1:29 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?
I am a little new to managing large numbers of CentOS/RHEL servers and was wondering what you experienced sysadmins prefer, Spacewalk or Puppet?
If you look at recent posts, you'll know my opinion of Spacewalk (not high, for large values of "not", and small values of "high").
mark
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Dan Burkland wrote:
Mark,
What would you recommend for a larger environment then?
If I had to choose it would be puppet over spacewalk, though I may use spacewalk for the kickstart and inventory stuff.
Note that spacewalk requires oracle(last I checked) so depending on the size of your environment, there is that added cost.
Myself I use cfengine, manage around 400 systems with it currently. Haven't had the time to check puppet out, heard it's pretty neat, but cfengine does everything I need and I know it pretty well(using it for the past 5 years) so no real incentive to learn something new at this point.
I have my own custom kickstart setup for system installation (again based off work that has evolved over the past 5-6 years).
nate
Dan Burkland wrote:
What would you recommend for a larger environment then?
I'm currently supporting the largest environment I've ever done, and we've got under 200 servers, I think. We've got a small package to handle all the configuration files, a system my manager wrote.
If I had to choose it would be puppet over spacewalk, though I may use spacewalk for the kickstart and inventory stuff.
Haven't played almost at all with kickstart.
Note that spacewalk requires oracle(last I checked) so depending on the size of your environment, there is that added cost.
Yes, it does, at least as of 0.5. Now, you can d/l Oracle XE (which is 10g, I think) for free, but it has some hard limits - 1G memory, and I think 4G data.
Myself I use cfengine, manage around 400 systems with it currently. Haven't had the time to check puppet out, heard it's pretty neat, but cfengine does everything I need and I know it pretty well(using it for the past 5 years) so no real incentive to learn something new at this point.
I've seen a lot of folks saying they used cfengine. <snip> mark
On 03/11/09 19:23, Dan Burkland wrote:
I am a little new to managing large numbers of CentOS/RHEL servers and was wondering what you experienced sysadmins prefer, Spacewalk or Puppet?
They are not really the same thing - puppet tends to be more policy and role centric while spacewalk is more state centric. Which tool one should use depends a lot on what and how they define 'management' of machines.
If building-from-bare-metal is not going to be a concern, I would recommend skipping spacewalk at the initial steps and move to evaluate the config and policy management tools [1], see what fits the requirements better.
Then as a second step, consider spacewalk as a tool that can be brought in later to do more of state-management. Also, I would ignore the comments about spacewalk being a waste of time - at ver 0.6 its very usable today. Just needs a bit of thinking about its layout and policies and it *does* need a significant investment in time. Much more so than. as an example puppet would need to start with.
Anyway, my point really being that spacewalk and puppet are not competing components that can be compared on a fair platform.
- KB
[1]: puppet / chef / bcfg2 : all worth looking at, cfengine is now mostly a waste of time and only worth considering if you already have skill and/or legacy to support.
Also, I believe cobbler functionality is being included in Spacewalk. Though I haven't delved too deeply into either yet (we do use RHN Satellite 5.0.x), I need to evaluate whether Spacewalk/newer versions of Satellite can manage hosts *other* than RHEL easily. I'd hate to maintain both a Satellite/Spacewalk install *and* cobbler if I didn't have to.
Ray
Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 03/11/09 21:13, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Also, I believe cobbler functionality is being included in Spacewalk.
spacewalk 0.6 is able to deploy machines with cobbler and do initial snippet management too.
At that point I pass it over to puppet personally. Used to use cfengine, but there are aspects I prefer when it comes to puppet; your mileage may of course vary.
-- Corey / KB1JWQ
On 03/11/09 23:42, Corey Chandler wrote:
At that point I pass it over to puppet personally. Used to use cfengine, but there are aspects I prefer when it comes to puppet; your mileage may of course vary.
well, refer back to my initial email on the subject. Its how you split state and policy - puppet isnt all that great at state management but does a great job of policy management and enforcement for that state.
But then again it depends on how you play your setup, and exactly how you define what 'management' really is.
- KB
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Also, I believe cobbler functionality is being included in Spacewalk. Though I haven't delved too deeply into either yet (we do use RHN Satellite 5.0.x), I need to evaluate whether Spacewalk/newer versions of Satellite can manage hosts *other* than RHEL easily. I'd hate to maintain both a Satellite/Spacewalk install *and* cobbler if I didn't have to.
cobbler is *required* by Spacewalk, and is installed with it.
mark
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Dan Burkland dburklan@nmdp.org wrote:
I am a little new to managing large numbers of CentOS/RHEL servers and was wondering what you experienced sysadmins prefer, Spacewalk or Puppet?
Chef showed up on my radar this morning. Have you seen it or used it. Looks pretty promising.
Tracy
On 11/04/2009 12:47 AM, Tracy Phillips wrote:
Chef showed up on my radar this morning. Have you seen it or used it. Looks pretty promising.
I use Chef as well, and it is quite interesting in that it allows you to essentially have a systems management object in a proper language ( Ruby in this case ) rather than a DSL ( like puppet ). And while this is its strength, its also - imho - a massive weakness.
If you have a few machines, and dont mind getting into installing and managing a boat load of associated code, Chef is worth looking into. If you are a large scale enterprise or a business where employing sysadmins who are also expected to be moderately fluent in Ruby. I'd give Chef a miss for the time being. There are a few wrappers being developed around chef, none of which look mature enough to use. Wait for something to come through those lines first.
On 11/04/2009 11:23 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote: If
you are a large scale enterprise or a business where employing sysadmins who are also expected to be moderately fluent in Ruby.
... isnt always possible.
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Corey Chandler -
Dan Burkland -
Karanbir Singh -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
mark
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nate -
Ray Van Dolson -
Tracy Phillips