Hi
I'm starting to put together a portage/stable server configuration for a large number of gentoo VM's that will eventually be hosted on a VMware ESX 4.1U1 cluster - with the goal of limiting major changes to once/year and otherwise only applying security/minimum necessary updates. I doubt it will be easy but I'm doing my best at it :)
This sounds very interesting. I haven't yet plugged through your blog, but just to chime in:
I maintain a, likely much smaller, number of VMs using linux vservers. The approach here is to almost cut each machine down to a chroot that runs only one (or thereabouts) interesting service. To do this I have found customised portage profiles to be the under-plugged secret since they allow you to basically push a set of packages which should be installed and control "per type of vm" use flags and package keywords (eg I have www-nginx, www-apache, mail, proxy, mysql, ftp, etc profiles). Additionally I have a small overlay of local ebuilds that sit in the same tree
Up until now I haven't really made any effort to sync this whole tree across multiple physical machines and it's a bit of an ad-hoc process. Using something like git would probably be perfect
The still missing step is configuration management across the machine types, eg I want to upgrade all my "Apache-WWW" class machines and merge in all changes in /etc in a certain way... At the moment I just run dispatch-conf across all machines, but it can be quite boring merging 20 instances of sshd.conf... Seems like Puppet/Chef could be a solution here, but the step up and investment to make it work seems pretty large?
It does appear like managing large numbers of virtual machines is one are that gentoo could score very well? Interested to see any chatter on how others solve this problem, or any general advocacy? Probably we should start a new thread though...
Regards Ed W
