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

[Brian Hatfield < >]

Maxime, I have seen that some people are using pxe_dust; we currently have our own internal developed solution that does exactly what you describe. 

I'd love to hear what other people are doing, because I too think Crowbar is a little heavyweight for our needs, and I am currently in a position to replace our existing provisioning infrastructure.

Thanks for starting this topic,

Brian

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Maxime Brugidou < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

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