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

[Eric Heydrick < >]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 1:25 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
>

A tool like Cobbler assists with automating the provisioning portion
of your lifecycle management. Chef can be installed in the postinstall
script of the kickstart/preseed and Cobbler can pass the runlist to a
first run json to get the system configured into its role. Using
Cobbler's API you can integrate it into some other tool that kicks off
the provisioning process. This could be a knife plugin or a script
that talks to the API. In my case I needed to provision on vmware so I
wrote a tool that creates a blank VM, adds it to Cobbler/DHCP/DNS, and
then boots the VM into a non-interactive preseed install of JeOS.
Takes about 10 minutes to build a fully configured system from scratch
with one command.

-Eric