[chef] "Managed Nodes" in chef for network switched, PDUs...

[Maxime Brugidou < >]

Ohai chefs,

I stumbled accross this old session summary (http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Managed+Nodes+Part+2 ) while looking for a way to automate our network switch, and other custom hardware configuration where we can't run chef-client. Do you think this could ever happen?

We are currently managing our bare metal infrastructure with Chef and we looked into Crowbar but decided not to use it for many reasons (focus on Openstack, works for one DC only and we have multiple, very heavy process to use barclamps and wrap Chef). We went lean and basically built a set of cookbooks to provide PXE boot, OS installation, DHCP/DNS/IPMI and other things (BIOS upgrade, RAID firmware...). Thus we don't rely on anything but chef and we can use community cookbooks as much as possible.

However now we look into automating configuration for other hardware devices and Managed Nodes look like an interesting solution, especially since there isn't any system available that's not vendor specific. We already have a database that handle the hardware location part (like, rack, room, DC, serial number, etc...) and we use ohai plugins to populate the data into Chef.

Any idea? What are other people using?

Cheers,

Maxime