[CentOS] automated remote cloning

[Kwan Lowe]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 6:50 AM, Geoff Galitz <geoff at galitz.org> wrote:
>
> Good morning/day and Happy New Year.
>
> We have a geographically distributed environment (marketing speak: cloud)
> where we regularly need to migrate individual systems to new hardware (for
> bigger disks or for better geographical placement, for example).  We
> currently use Cobbler to do our base installs automatically and I am now
> looking at integrating Clonezilla with Cobbler.  The goal is take an
> *individual* system that has been customized and migrate it in an automated
> fashion.
>
> We currently do this using Cobbler and then running rsync and mysqldump in a
> script along with other system -> userland module configurations (such as
> PHP modules) but the process is tedious and generally a PITA.  We also must
> have the ability to run this across different datacenters on different
> continents.
>
> Any pointers to good automated solutions?

Do you use cfengine or puppet in your environment?  If you install the
base packages via post installation scripts, you can use cfengine to
layer on specific host identities (hostname, IP, configuration,
packages, etc.).  With either of these tools you can import
configurations from a running host and then layer them back to a new
host.  There is some considerable setup to get it to that point, but
lots of scripts available online so much of the work is done.