Foreman from a Consultant's perspective - Dirk Goetz - Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
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This document discusses implementing configuration management solutions like Foreman from a consultant's perspective. It provides case studies of Foreman projects that covered initial situations, required features, limitations, and how Foreman addressed needs like provisioning, configuration management, and a single point of administration. The document also stresses the importance of knowledge transfer, support, and expanding training materials after a project's completion.
Foreman from a Consultant's perspective - Dirk Goetz - Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 1. Foreman from a consultant's perspective Configmanagement Camp Ghent 2017 1 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 2. What to expect Anatomy of a Foreman Project From minimal setup To "All in" Some case studies Initial situation Solved Problems / Required features Open Problems / Limitations Fortune telling Wishlisting 2 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 3. Not enough For a project implementing a configuration management solution it is not enough to only install it and tell the people "Now you have configuration management". This is true for internal projects, but even more important for consulting. 3 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 4. Case study "Pre-Sales" One of the first big projects utilising Foreman (06/2013) Initial situation Opportunity for Puppet Enterprise and Cloud Provisioner Cloud Provisioner could not fulfill customer needs Required Features Provisioning via PXE and Compute Resource Puppet Open Source for Configuration management Limitation Manual installation of Puppet on existing systems 4 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 5. Bare Minimum The bare minimum for such projects is some form of reporting and while some admins can live or even want files, mail or other messages, most people want a graphical interface. Furthermore a provision is needed so configuration management is available on new and already existing systems even if is a dedicated agent is not required, some requirements like user and ssh keys need to be fulfilled. 5 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 6. Case study "Car manufacturer" Initial situation Old puppet master Manuall provisioning Required Features Provisioning via PXE DNS management done later after their old solution failed Limitation Compute resource not used because of Capacity Manager DNS lacking support for CNAME 6 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 7. What people expect People quite often have an expectation of configuration management allowing to have immediate changes, running ad-hoc tasks or handle cross-system dependencies. 7 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 8. Case study "Bank" - Part 1 A project born by need Initial situation Admins calculated one week for a new virtual machine A new project required a unknown number of new systems within days Required Features Provisioning without PXE on Compute Resource Open Problem Strict separation of VLANs requires firewall rules for "everything" 8 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 9. Case study "Bank" - Part 2 A project born by need Initial situation Security requirement to apply updates as soon as possible Admins apply updates manually Workflow and Admin in charge differ based on operating system Required Features Remote Execution allows to run all the updates at once Open Problem Quality assurance via staging 9 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 10. Improve the quality Installation of software can be hard if it is not available in form of packages for your system. Requiring a specific version of a package is also not a trivial problem to solve. These tasks are better solved with a software management solution than configuration management trying to do so. In the past NETWAYS did some Spacewalk installations, now it is typically Katello, not Red Hat Satellite as we do not want to interfer with Red Hat. 10 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 11. Katello - Why or why not? Perhaps 1 of 10 installation is Katello instead of Foreman No new Spacewalk installation for a while People like the Content Lifecycle for packages But it adds to much complexity Content Lifecycle for other content Multitenancy Red Hat Content / Subscription Management Docker Missing full support for SLES and Debian 11 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 12. Single point of administration Many people want to use only one interface for their daily doings. This makes integration and extendability very important, Foreman's API and plugins really stand out here. Also eye candy matters more and more if you need to sell something to the management. Sometimes small improvements help like Column View showing additional information, Expire host doing some clean up, or Boot Disk and VMware working together in an enviroment without PXE. 12 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 13. Case study "Netways Managed Service" Initial situation Multiple Virtualization solutions managed by OpenNebula Puppet as Configurationmanagment Some manual step required Multiple Usergroups: Managed Service Team, Internals, Customers Developed Feature Compute Resource Opennebula 13 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 14. Knowledge matters After a project customers should be able to use and maintain the installed solution on their own. Knowledge transfer is always a part of the project, but Foreman's documentation really helps with it. Furthermore we created the training material to help with building up knowledge. Training material is keeped up to date and released as Open Source. We now use the model also for other trainings and plan to get them all out at training.netways.de. 14 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 15. Case study "Netways Training Environment" Initial situation Notebook installation from golden images Rental notebooks incompatible with golden images Required Feature PXE provisioning for Notebooks Discovered Hosts for Rental Notebooks Custom UI for Events team utilizing the API 15 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 16. Customer Loyality To increase customer loyality you should provide support subsequent to projects. NETWAYS offers support for Foreman within Puppet support contracts. 16 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 17. Fortune Telling More projects with Ansible instead of Puppet More functions / plugins used, especially Remote Execution More Katello projects Expansion of the training material 17 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018
- 18. Wishlisting Foreman More stable on major releases Less breaking plugins Move Puppet to a plugin, improve integration of Ansible Foreman's parameters working nicely with Roles- Profiles-Pattern of Puppet Katello More features as optional Full support for other operatingsystems NETWAYS Someone able and willing to develop Foreman plugins Myself More Foreman / Katello projects 18 Cfgmgmtcamp Ghent 2018