[chef] Re: General questions about provision/kickstart!

[Matt Ray < >]

Provisioning machines is not explicitly done by Chef, but there are
tools that work well with Chef.

For simple PXE-booting nodes and provisioning their OS and installing
Chef, I have a set of cookbooks tied together called pxe_dust that is
currently Ubuntu-only, but there's no reason other OS's couldn't fit
into the system.
http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/pxe_dust

Crowbar is a tool that provisions machines and is intended for rapidly
deploying large numbers of boxes and managing them with Chef.
https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar

Of course, if you're using the cloud there are a number of knife
plugins for automatically provisioning boxes (knife ec2, rackspace,
cloud-stack, eucalyptus, etc.). A Cobbler cookbook probably wouldn't
be too difficult to write if there isn't one already.

Thanks,
Matt Ray
Senior Technical Evangelist | Opscode Inc.

 
 | (512) 731-2218
Twitter, IRC, GitHub: mattray



On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:25 AM, Sven Sternberger
<
 >
 wrote:
> Hello!
>
> we are examine alternatives to our legacy CM infrastructure.
> I'm little bit puzzled about which parts chef plays.
>
> I would look at cobbler vs. foreman for
> provisioning and Chef vs. puppet for CM. But is
> this correct? Could chef do the provisioning without
> cobbler/foreman? What is "best practice" to provision
> servers.
>
> We are mainly using Scientific Linux (RHEL-Clone) and
> a little bit ubuntu.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> regards
>
> sven
>