Hi Tom,
Imho, the choice between Bladelogic/Opsware and Cfengine should be decided depending on the homogeneity/standardization of your IT (both software and hardware) and on the number/complexity of applications your IT supports. 1/ standardization : Driving a Bladelogic/Opsware project inside an IT infrastructure where you dont have a DSL and a DHS (ITIL terms for Definitive Software Library and Definitive Hardware Store) defined and seriously implemented since several years will get you suboptimal benefits from these tools. Using these tools to, lets say provision servers, manage applications release, or get some SOX audit controls applied, will indeed require a heavy and expensive setup phase where your flexibility with the tool (which can for sure do a million things when you read the datasheet) is always limited by the standardization and maturity level of your IT infrastructure : the more OS, Apache versions, servers manufacturers, etc. you have to deal with, the less efficient and powerful BL/Opsware will be. On the other hand, you have a strong benefit to use Cfengine in a less standardized environment, where Cfengine agent will more easily adapt to less mature DSL/DHS. In order to get a scalable system, you will anyway have to define and refine your DSL/DHS in the future, but real life will always get you to manage some old-and-now-unsupported OS or customer-specific-version for an application, and there Cfengine wins. The learning curve for Cfengine DSL (Domain Specific Language, this time :) ) and its specialization around configuration management might make you spend a not-so-trivial integration and customization cost in order to change it in a complete IT infrastructure manager, but dont be fooled by the HP and BMC salesmen : you will anyway have approx the same integration cost on BL/OPsware side. All these tools are complex systems and their setup is awfully expensive. 2/ number/complexity of applications: The more unacceptable shortcoming from Bladelogic/Opsware in my mind is their intrusive behavior inside your organization. Let me explain. Lets say you want to use BL in order to control successive version releases for a web application of your company. You will then need the developers of this application to deliver you with BL-specific packages for these releases. Getting them to only change their release process to use a new SVN repository or a new FTP server can be a complicated story then I let you think of getting them to change their whole development framework and tools so that they will now deliver a BL-package to fit YOUR tool : that may cost you loads of beers :) There I think that it would not be a problem if you had to deal with <10 applications, all using the same J2EE server/version on tens of servers, and developed by small andmature development teams. But if you are an IT service manager with hundreds of clients, applications, HW servers, different technologies and software version your life will become a nightmare for sure with BL/Opsware, while using Cfengine with standard repository and package technologies (FTP, SMB, SVN, JAR, ) will be way much more handy and flexible. Flexible for you configuring the tool, but also for your development teams who will not all have to change too much for you (note that the beers will anyway remain a good idea). More things I would give a warning about are : - the software agents performance: BMC sales will never let you know much about the memory footprint and CPU usage of their agent. You might only get to know that the agent files on the server are <40MB so useful data :). Cfengine agent low resource usage on the other hand is just legendary and can be decisive on a large, complex IT infrastructure - the imperative paradigm used by BL/Opsware to drive the infrastructure is now deprecated, but also non-scalable, lowly resilient and can there too be overwhelmed on a large and complex IT infrastructure. Spending money on a customization of Cfengine may there be a better investment for the future. But this email is already too long and I guess other people will have some interesting feedback on these subjects so Ill end here! Regards, Nicolas GOSSET Normation CEO / Directeur Général Normation 44 rue Cauchy, 94110 Arcueil Fixe: +33 (0)1 83 62 41 23 | Mobile: +33 (0)6 61 76 74 27 <mailto:nicolas.gos...@normation.com> nicolas.gos...@normation.com | <http://www.normation.com/> http://www.normation.com De : help-cfengine-boun...@cfengine.org [mailto:help-cfengine-boun...@cfengine.org] De la part de Tom Tucker Envoyé : mardi 1 mars 2011 23:09 À : CFEngine Help Objet : Any comments? I have been through several presentations with BMC, HP and others and how their suite of tools can replace our current system provisioning and configuration management tools. They made some very big claims how they can provide the same functionality and also integrate with other vendors (VMware, Cisco, F5 BigIP, NetApp, etc) to ulimately provide a push button system provisioning and management. This sounds all well and good, but I'm concerned about my current Cfengine deployment. I would hate to see a specialized tool like Cfengine that does a specific job very well get replaced by another tool that does a million things reasonable well. This particular vendor is now pushing hard for a POC/pilot with us. I suspect the POC will work as promised, but in a very basic island type environment. I can imagine the real integration will take many many months and we will discover in the end loss of functionality, heavy customization at a high cost. Do you have words of warning or past experiences you don't mind sharing (publically or privately)? Thank you, Tom
<<image002.png>>
_______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@cfengine.org https://cfengine.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
