Joseph L. Casale wrote:

...

Yes, I tried to use it opposed to postgresql to store the data for my web application in it.

...

It really sucked as a database.

Data, or "config"?

...

PS: Can you elaborate a bit which other foss apps you mean and what you are trying to accomplish?

http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/faq.html#whatis

If you know what it is and use it, you will likely be in a position to answer:) How's that database coming btw?

Does it have any hooks to deal with network hardware and OS's that aren't RHEL/Centos/Fedora? Something that only handles part of your inventory sounds like more trouble than it would be worth.

Johnny Hughes wrote:

...

Does it have any hooks to deal with network hardware and OS's that aren't RHEL/Centos/Fedora? Something that only handles part of your inventory sounds like more trouble than it would be worth.

It is basically an open source version of RHN.

Thanks, but that doesn't help much with my question since I haven't used RHN either. I'd like to have some comprehensive inventory/monitoring/deployment tool but it has to work across different platforms. Ocsinventory-ng works for computer hardware/software inventory and has some (not very usable) deployment features, OpenNMS can monitor about anything, Racktables can show layouts and store configurations, but each of these have separate databases and interfaces with big conceptual differences. Is there anything that combines the operations that people actually have to do to mange data centers in one (preferably free) tool?

Joseph L. Casale wrote:

...

Thanks, but that doesn't help much with my question since I haven't used RHN either. I'd like to have some comprehensive inventory/monitoring/deployment tool but it has to work across different platforms. Ocsinventory-ng works for computer hardware/software inventory and has some (not very usable) deployment features, OpenNMS can monitor about anything, Racktables can show layouts and store configurations, but each of these have separate databases and interfaces with big conceptual differences. Is there anything that combines the operations that people actually have to do to mange data centers in one (preferably free) tool?

Well it looks like it does rhel/centos/fedora/solaris which just leaves windows for me. (Caught the Solaris bit off the wiki)

We're probably 90% windows. Clonezilla mostly works for initial deployment across platforms as long as the hardware is close to identical but most of the other tools make linux the odd special case.

What don't you like about Ocsinventory-ng?

As an inventory system it doesn't handle network devices. The windows agent sometimes stops reporting on 64-bit systems - and doesn't have a way to extend what it can report about the client. The deployment scheme doesn't give fine-grained control of when each target will install something (might be OK for a bunch of desktops with all night to complete, not so good for members of a server farm providing a critical 24/7 service).

OpenNMS is very nice:) Too much learning curve, no time atm. I use Nagios, and would love to move off it to Zenoss but it looks like the support around zenoss isn't as good.

OpenNMS does more automatically with the default setup than anything else I've seen but there are still a lot of special cases. They are adding some hooks to other tools for provisioning but so far nothing that I'm likely to use. It has some inventory concepts of its own, but not complete enough and too closely tied to IP addresses to be useful.

nate wrote:

...

operations that people actually have to do to mange data centers in one (preferably free) tool?

You seen http://www.hyperic.com/products/enterprise-systems-monitoring.html

yet? Never used it myself, I think they are owned by VMware now.

They have an open source version but don't see the deployment portion in that.

I did look at it some time ago but didn't like the requirement of a JVM for the client agent compared to the smaller ocsinventory agent executable. Current server capabilities probably make it a lot less important today but it still seems like a lot of overhead. On the other hand, that is one of the systems that has hooks to integrate with OpenNMS.