Hi all,

I have a general question to you. My server farm increases continuously and now I want to know how do you manage or deploy you server farms?

We use Red Hat EL 4 and I know that we could buy Red Hat Sattelite Server but it is quite expensive and therefore i'm searching for another solution.

At the moment i'm using serveral kickstart files for my deployment.

I haven't found anything in the forum and so i hope to receive some useful answers :-)

Cheers,
Phru

How many servers are we talking about? How regularly do you need to deploy new ones? Do they all run the same software or are they all different?

i know this is an obvious one, but did you try something like xen?
you can easily create generic images and deployment is pretty flexible.

have no idea about rh sattelite honestly, but other then the price i could not find any features missing that you can not do yourself, it will depend on your needs exacltly if its worth the price

Actually we have 45 Linux servers. I have to deploy 15 to 20 a year. There are running several applications but mostly I only have to deploy the server/system and the application will be deployed by the responsible carer.

I am moving forward to use vmware esx but I don't want to work with images because of the different RPM requirements.

My major goal is that I have several configuration sections and connect them with a few steps to one kickstart file.

I'm in the same boat. 20-40 servers a year. I use a repository server. It has the ISO images on it and my kickstart files. It also runs DHCP(required for remote kickstart).
I have to install RH3 and RH4 as AS or ES 32 or 64 .
When I build a new server, I just boot it from CD1 and do an NFS install from the repository. linux ks=nfs:10.1.1.1:/repo/kickstart/ks.cfg
With the kickstart file pointing it to the correct installation directory :
nfs --server=10.1.1.1 --dir=/repo/install/redhat4-64-ES
It takes me 12 minutes to install Linux. To update the packages later, I use up2date to download the RPMS on one server, but not install them. I copy them to to the repository and use html or NFS for installing them on the other servers with Yum. If I am installing a number of identical servers at once with a similar build, I just build one server and copy the disks. Most of my servers are Raid 1, so its a simple matter of pulling the 2nd disk out, replacing it with a blank one, and put the 2nd disk into another server and letting it sync. Make sure you get it right so you don't sync the blank disk onto the data disk. I also wrote a post build script that does all my SOE stuff. So after I have built a new server, I NFS mount the repository which has the script and all the required packages etc. and execute it. So to build a new server, as long as kickstart has all the partitioning info, I type one command to install Linux, NFS mount the repository, and run one command for the SOE. EASY.

I do it in nearly the same way. I have my source server which also contains my kickstart files. The kickstart files also contain some NFS mounts and scripts so that the basic configuration is done after the installation.

Further I have a repository server (mrepo) which provides the RPMs for the update.

What do you use for further configuration management?!

Thank you in advance.

Hi Phru ,
I know what you mean. We just had to roll out patches for all our servers to implement a daylight savings change. What a pain.
We are looking at a product called " managesoft " which you need to purchase .
We need to have something that can handle all the different flavors of Unix RH, centos, solaris, HP + windows.

I will have a look on that software. Maybe it's the right tool. I have to manage RHEL and HP-UX.

Thank you for the hint

Although we have not tried it, the Redhat Cobbler info may help:
http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/

Hello,

thank you for your reply. The program looks pretty cool and I am going to test it.

Cheers,
Phru