On 17/09/2014 09:34, J. Roeleveld wrote: > > On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 10:43:18 PM Alan McKinnon wrote: >> Anyone here used ansible and at least one of puppet/chef? >> >> What are your thoughts? >> >> I've made several attempts over the years to get puppet going but never >> really got it off the ground. Chef I stay away from (likely due to the >> first demo of it I saw and how badly that went....) >> >> Puppet seems to me a good product for a large site with 1000 hosts. >> Not so much for ~20 or so. Plus puppet's language and configs get large >> and hard to keep track of - lots and lots of directory trees with many >> things mentioning other things. (Nagios has the same problem if you >> start keeping host, services, groups and commands in many different files) >> >> I've stumbled upon ansible, it seems much better than puppet for >> smallish sites with good odds I might even keep the whole thing in my >> head at any one time :-) >> >> Anyone care to share experiences? > > No experiences yet, but I have been looking for options to quickly and easily > create (and remove) VMs lab environments.
Have you tried Vagrant? I haven't tried it myself, I'm just reacting to the "VM" keyword ;-) > > I agree with your comments on Chef and Puppet. > Ansible looks nice and seems easy to manage. I miss an option to store the > configuration inside a database, but I don't see an issue adding the > generation of the config-files from database tables to the rest of the > environment I am working on. Ansible has an add-on called Tower that seems to do this. The marketing blurb implies you can use almost any storage backend you like from MySQL and PostGres to LDAP > > I like that Ansible also seems to support MS Windows nodes, just too bad that > requires enabling it after install. But with this, cloning VMs and changing > the network configs afterwards seems easier to manage. I'm lucky, this is a Unix-only shop so I don't have to deal with Windows servers. The three managers who have Windows laptops for varying reasons have all been clearly told upfront they will support themselves and I ain't touching it :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
