[CentOS] managing a rack full of centos servers

[Les Mikesell]

On 7/19/11 6:43 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>
> its looking like I might need to setup a deployment of a dozen or 2
> basically identical machines, all running pretty much the same sorts of
> stuff.  I have zero experience with the sorts of management tools folks
> use to automate this type of configuration, both initial setup, and
> ongoing management (system updates, user application updates,
> configuration changes, etc).
>
> anyone care to suggest any such tools, maybe some real-world pros and
> cons?   of course, being centos, I prefer FOSS tools.   for various
> reasons, this environment likely will NOT be virtualized (although I may
> emulate a test setup with vmware).

If the server hardware is really identical including disks of the same sizes, 
the fastest way to roll them out is probably clonezilla, which has the big 
advantage of being mostly agnostic toward the target OS.  You can try it out 
with the bootable iso, using sshfs or nfs to connect to network storage for the 
image.  If you like it, set up the drbl server to pxe boot into it.  It is rpm 
packaged, but I ended up using ubuntu on the server because it used to only use 
the server's kernel on the clients and I needed something newer than Centos 
provided for windows machines.  Now I believe you  can configure it to pxe boot 
the image from a current livecd even if you run it on a different server. 
Besides the ability to clone windows and other OS's, it also is good for 
snapshot backups of systems (if you can take them down for the copy) and it 
duplicates everything, including any local installs and config edits.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.cm