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.