[chef] Re: Baremetal Provisioning

[Chris Burroughs < >]

We use collins http://tumblr.github.io/collins/ as an asset db & state 
management tool, and cobbler to do the actual kickstart stuff.

This means that collins & friends care about provisioning related tasks: 
Is this hunk of metal burned working and counted for? Serial number? 
Rack location?  DHCP configured? DNS? Which ks file to use?

The last thing the ks files do is install chef and then it's out of 
"provisioning"  and into "configuration management".  From there it 
probably doesn't look any different than any other use of chef.  This 
means that we can treat nodes in chef as ephemeral and another system 
deals with stuff like keeping track of serial numbers for 3 years.

We use an ohai plugin to suck in all of the collins info for each node 
so chef can play with that too.  That gives us some niceties like chef 
/etc/motd saying "YO THIS BOX IS BROKEN" when an asset is put into 
maintenance in collins.

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,
>
> Phillip Roberts | Sr. Linux Administrator
> San Mateo | Ann Arbor | New York | London
> O 734.922.7014 | C 614.423.9871 | www.MyBuys.com<http://www.mybuys.com/>
> [cid:image001.png@01CDDDEC.1264D1F0]