RHN, Cobbler and Chef

I am looking for some provisioning guidance…

We have a Red Hat Satellite server installed, but not well used/configured yet.

I’m not sold that RHN is the best solution for us.

I want Chef to be the “backbone” app that manages our Red Hat servers, packages, config files, services, etc.

Should RHN manage general OS packages and chef do specific things?

e.g. I have a apache role, assign it to a server. Part of the role says what version of apache to use. Should that functionality live in cobbler/RHN instead?

Should we have a “production” repo that contains all packages and have chef ensure what is locally installed matches the production repo? Should that be RHN’s job?

Is this a “it depends” type answer?

Craig

Craig,

Personally I would recommend keeping it all in Chef. Our company started with a RHN sat server that handled a limited amount of management / deployment on RHEL systems. We’ve moved to a pure Chef setup since then and it’s made life a lot easier as we can manage all system types in a single location. It’ll probably make your life a lot easier to have it all come from a single location. Creating two sources of truth will only cause confusion and reduce some of the cool things you can do with Chef via search.

Tim Smith

Operations Engineer

M: +1 707.738.8132

TW: @tas50

webtrendshttp://www.webtrends.com/

Real-Time Relevance. Remarkable ROI.™

London | Portland | San Francisco | Melbourne | Tokyo

From: Craig Cook <Craig.Cook@carquest.commailto:Craig.Cook@carquest.com>
Reply-To: "chef@lists.opscode.commailto:chef@lists.opscode.com" <chef@lists.opscode.commailto:chef@lists.opscode.com>
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 9:17 AM
To: "chef@lists.opscode.commailto:chef@lists.opscode.com" <chef@lists.opscode.commailto:chef@lists.opscode.com>
Subject: [chef] RHN, Cobbler and Chef

I am looking for some provisioning guidance…

We have a Red Hat Satellite server installed, but not well used/configured yet.

I’m not sold that RHN is the best solution for us.

I want Chef to be the “backbone” app that manages our Red Hat servers, packages, config files, services, etc.

Should RHN manage general OS packages and chef do specific things?

e.g. I have a apache role, assign it to a server. Part of the role says what version of apache to use. Should that functionality live in cobbler/RHN instead?

Should we have a “production” repo that contains all packages and have chef ensure what is locally installed matches the production repo? Should that be RHN’s job?

Is this a “it depends” type answer?

Craig

although i agree with most of the points , i think the infrastructure
backbone will spill over to more than one software/framework. It might be
possible for really specific use cases that we can do every thing in chef.

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 12:52 AM, Tim Smith Tim.Smith@webtrends.com wrote:

Craig,

Personally I would recommend keeping it all in Chef. Our company
started with a RHN sat server that handled a limited amount of management /
deployment on RHEL systems. We've moved to a pure Chef setup since then
and it's made life a lot easier as we can manage all system types in a
single location. It'll probably make your life a lot easier to have it all
come from a single location. Creating two sources of truth will only cause
confusion and reduce some of the cool things you can do with Chef via
search.

 *Tim Smith*

Operations Engineer

M: +1 707.738.8132

TW: @tas50

webtrends http://www.webtrends.com/

Real-Time Relevance. Remarkable ROI.™

London | Portland | San Francisco | Melbourne | Tokyo

From: Craig Cook Craig.Cook@carquest.com
Reply-To: "chef@lists.opscode.com" chef@lists.opscode.com
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 9:17 AM
To: "chef@lists.opscode.com" chef@lists.opscode.com
Subject: [chef] RHN, Cobbler and Chef

I am looking for some provisioning guidance…****


We have a Red Hat Satellite server installed, but not well
used/configured yet.****


I’m not sold that RHN is the best solution for us.****


I want Chef to be the “backbone” app that manages our Red Hat servers,
packages, config files, services, etc.****


Should RHN manage general OS packages and chef do specific things?****


e.g. I have a apache role, assign it to a server. Part of the role says
what version of apache to use. Should that functionality live in
cobbler/RHN instead?****


Should we have a “production” repo that contains all packages and have
chef ensure what is locally installed matches the production repo? Should
that be RHN’s job?****


Is this a “it depends” type answer?****


Craig****

Craig,
We use both RHN and chef. Primarliy we use RHN for patching the OS. However we also use it to provide additional channels, such as the RBEL repo(which we keep on the RHN satellite server). We are in a kind of hybrid mode, where we use chef for deploying only a portion of our infrastructure(eg splunk), but everything else is manually installed(this is to do with timescales, learning curve for chef, legacy boxes, and what you know works). I suspect we will be in this hybrid mode for at least 2 more years before we are in a position to move fully to chef, and even then, I am not 100% certain that we won’t bring the RHN satellite server along. Nice to redeploy all your infrastructure with every patch update, but am not convinced we will ever get to that stage(time/resource/legacy).

                                          Sc0tt...

From: Craig Cook [Craig.Cook@carquest.com]
Sent: 18 April 2012 19:17
To: chef@lists.opscode.com
Subject: [chef] RHN, Cobbler and Chef

I am looking for some provisioning guidance…

We have a Red Hat Satellite server installed, but not well used/configured yet.

I’m not sold that RHN is the best solution for us.

I want Chef to be the “backbone” app that manages our Red Hat servers, packages, config files, services, etc.

Should RHN manage general OS packages and chef do specific things?

e.g. I have a apache role, assign it to a server. Part of the role says what version of apache to use. Should that functionality live in cobbler/RHN instead?

Should we have a “production” repo that contains all packages and have chef ensure what is locally installed matches the production repo? Should that be RHN’s job?

Is this a “it depends” type answer?

Craig