TheForeman@NOAO

Discussion of how TheForeman is in use at NOAO (www.noao.edu) given at the 2013 Astronomical Data Center Technologies meeting (http://www.astdatcentech.org/).
http://www.astdatcentech.org/).

Transcript

1. @NOAO Joshua Hoblitt National Optical Astronomy Observatory AstDatCenTec April 18-19, 2013
2. Provisioning “Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.” – – David Gerrold David Gerrold
3. Definition • Initial bring up of freshly “racked & stacked” hardware – Including BIOS/BMC configuration – Installation/network booting of an operating system – Bootstraping of configuration management / remote management tools • Creation / configuration of VM images • Re-provisioning physical hardware – And/or re-provisioning VMs
4. Why automate provisioning? • Hosts (and now virtualized hosts) have been imaged either by hand or by pushing static images for decades; why do something different now? • Avoids the problem with base image “entropy”. • Does your environment pass the “yoink test”? What about the 3 alarm fire test? (DR) • Alex Perry @ Google talks about the opportunity cost of repair vs reimaging • If the cost (labor/time) of re-provisioning approaches zero, what would you do different?
5. TheForeman Features • Aspiring to provide complete life-cycle management of physical and virtual hosts • Tightly integrates with puppet – Fact discovery – Puppet certificate management – Puppet External Node Classifier (ENC) – Puppet report processor – *this tight coupling is being slowly abstracted to allow integration with other CM tools (chef, etc.)
6. TheForeman Features (cont.) • DNS management • DHCP management • OS provisioning (tftp setup, build script templates, etc.) • “Cloud Provisioning” oVirt, Openstack, EC2, etc. (mostly via fog) • IPMI/BMC management*
7. Foreman Architecutre Shamelessly stolen from: http://theforeman.org/static/images/foreman_architecture.png
8. Current Usage @ NOAO • Managing ~90 physical and virtual hosts • PXE booting / provisioning of most physical & virtual hosts • Managing libvirt/KVM hypervisors directly • Puppet CA, ENC, report processor • DNS not managed (awaiting AWS route53 integration)
9. Planned Usage @ NOAO • Expand to manage provisioning all hosts/VMs in Tucson and La Serena – Will not include mountain top hosts beyond ENC & report functionality • Allow users to provision their own VMs – Functionality currently in v1.1 but there are some gotchas
10. Live Demo
11. Katello Shamelessly stolen from: http://www.katello.org/wp-content/themes/responsive/images/featured-image.png
12. Links • http://theforeman.org/ • http://www.katello.org/ • #theforeman & #theforeman-dev on freenode
13. Questions?