[chef] Re: Baremetal Provisioning

[Jay Pipes < >]

On 09/04/2013 11:54 AM, Phillip Roberts wrote:
> Does anyone have any good links or pointers to bare metal provisioning?
> I have done plenty of cloud based chef stuff, however, we want to now
> start managing all of our physical servers with chef as well. I am
> trying to replace as much of our build system as possible (ad hoc bash /
> perl scripts) for this provisioning. So I am looking for a good way to
> do this, I understand chef is not a PXE server, but just how far back in
> the tool chain can I go?
>
> My thoughts are serving up a kickstart file (since we are a RHEL / Cent
> based shop) that builds just enough of the OS in order to hand off to chef.
>
> Anyway, any pointers, or past presentations / links would be much
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks,

Hey there Phillip :)

We use Chef, Cobbler, and a small amount of Python glue code to 
provision our bare metal nodes and network devices (the ones that 
support modern OSs at least ;) -- nodes that run infrastructure 
services, nodes that run OpenStack API and support services, and
OpenStack Compute worker nodes (boxen that provide tenant-facing compute 
capacity). Works very well.

We use Ubuntu 12.04 as our base netboot OS, with a simple preseed setup 
that implants our Chef validation keys on a vanilla barebones server OS 
install, and our Python glue code simply calls out to Cobbler and Chef 
to populate node attributes (from a set of YAML files we keep about the 
nodes in our deployment zones), power cycle or netboot nodes, and stuff 
like that.

All in all, I would say the most pain we've experienced in Chef land has 
probably been around configuring raw network interfaces for bonded NIC 
setups (we've found it virtually impossible to configure networking 
properly without having Chef reboot the server once -- restarting 
networking just doesn't work reliably) and around out-of-order Chef node 
attribute get/set issues... something that isn't helped by the myriad 
different precedence levels associated with attributes for nodes, roles, 
environments, etc. My advice: stick to the "application cookbook" 
strategy (sometimes called "wrapper cookbook" strategy) versus putting 
any logic or much of anything in role definition files.

Best of luck, and Go Bucks! :)
-jay