Apologies for being late to this discussion... I have some history and experience with Kickstart and Cobbler through Red Hat Satellite Server. The current version of Satellite Server (6) is no longer using Cobbler. Instead they have moved into using Foreman+Puppet [1] and Katello+Pulp+Candlepin [2] to comprise the Satellite Server Suite. This is a fairly complex set of tools for system lifecycle, configuration, repository, and subscription/license management. In my current role and previous places of employment, we used the Foreman+Puppet alone. One of the beauties of Foreman is that it's interface with Config-Management automation tools is that it's plugin driven. The Default is Puppet, but Foreman also already works with other tools like Chef and Salt. There is ongoing development of user stories for the integration of Ansible, and I believe early version of the plugins have been published.
[1] http://theforeman.org [2] http://katello.org Foreman provides an orchestration front end for multi-platform Network or Custom Boot ISO based provisioning. Foreman can be integrated with ISC or MS DHCP and DNS to orchestrate the creating of leases and dns records as a new system is provisioned. Foreman supports EL kickstart, Debian preseed, and Solaris jumpstart for network provisioning, I have personally used kickstarts and jumpstarts (even for sparc) from Foreman. The provisioning profiles can be templated using ERB (ruby) to be made dynamic based on data that surrounds the new system (e.g. physical location, subnet, domain, OS, version, system owner, etc.). Foreman also integrates with Docker, Digital Ocean, OpenStack, oVirt, Xen, EC2, Rackspace, VMWare, Google Compute and LibVirt for cloud/virtual provisioning. I highly recommend anyone who might be interested in automated provisioning to take a look at the tool set. After 20 years of Solaris/AIX/HPUX and Linux system admining, I'm now a puppet guy, but I came to be so through what Foreman presented. The combination of these products revolutionizes the way I look at system deployment and ongoing management. The Foreman Team has produced a lot of nice Youtube videos and Google Hangout presentations covering the features and capabilities of the product. Like this mailing list, they are a very helpful bunch as well. In my current role today, we're producing a Foreman/Puppet based solution for the directorates in the govt. agency I work for. We expect to reduce the labor time in provisioning, configuring and enforcing policy compliance of Linux Desktops and Servers by a ratio of about 6:1. In most of these directorates today, system admins spend about 4-8 hours building and configuring a policy compliant linux systems...each uses their own methods. Foreman reduces the provisioning part to a few minutes, Puppet reduces the compliance part by hours. This opens the door for those admins to stop fighting compliance issues, even future remediation, as Puppet will continually enforce the policy as well as audit and report the actions it takes (reports presented nicely in Foreman), so that they can do the real work of supporting their customer's needs. Hope this helps!
