Bring order to the system jungle with Foreman
Conclusions
When I first became aware of Foreman as a UI for Puppet, I was pleasantly surprised that it could do so much. Foreman is the basis of Red Hat Satellite 6 and is also used in large installations such as eBay, which confirms my positive impression [2]. Some workflows need a bit of getting used to the first time you use them, but the actual work is no trouble once you understand them.
You will almost always receive prompt and competent response to problems in the IRC channel #theforeman on irc.freenode.net. Plugins for SaltStack and Chef make it possible for users of other orchestration solutions to use Foreman as well.
The project's lively community also contributes gems such as the Discovery plugin, which boots a mini-system on bare metal servers via PXE boot to populate the Foreman inventory. After the boot, you then know the MAC addresses and hardware conditions and can plan the new rack in the server room without ever having to set foot in the datacenter.
Reading the documentation is recommended, however, because manual configuration is sometimes required (e.g., on the DHCP server to create vendor spaces for Juniper or Sun). Studying the logfiles is often necessary, such as when you see an error message like Does not work returned by the web UI. As a whole, Foreman is a praiseworthy tool that can simplify everyday life tremendously at the datacenter.
Infos
- Foreman: http://www.theforeman.org
- Presentation at Puppetconf: http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/puppet-availability-and-performance-at-100k-nodes-puppetconf-2014
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