We use Salt to manage MS Windows. I believe Chef and Puppet are both better option for managing MS Windows systems. They both have a lot more developer and community support for MS Windows than I have seen for Ansible or Salt.
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 9:37 PM, Kristopher Zentner <kzent...@section6.net> wrote: > +1 for Chef on my side. I’ve got it managing over 500 Windows servers (and a > few Linux ones) on an Azure instance that’s just 8GB and the server barely > sweats. It can also do neat things like act as an encrypted password > management store for your scripts. For Windows I wouldn’t dig too deep into > the DSC side of things. Chef can do anything DSC does, and DSC is still a > little buggy. I’d created an entire DSC deployment for my clusters, and then > had to scrap it looking for another solution due to some core issues. > > I’ve played with Salt a couple years ago on a Linux infrastructure, but I > found the agents a little buggy and ended up switching to Chef and sticking > with it. The hot CMS these days seems to be Ansible, but I haven’t had reason > to play with it, and my current employer recently partnered with Chef > officially so I’ve had little reason to switch. > > Best, > > -kz > > > > On 3/31/15, 9:21 PM, "Leon Towns-von Stauber" <leo...@occam.com> wrote: > >>One of the main reasons we're looking at Salt as an alternative to CFE 3 is >>the support for Windows, which is pretty expensive for CFE. Our Windows team >>would like something better than SMS, and it'd be nice if we could share the >>same tool for Windows and Linux. >> >>Thanks to everyone for the responses. I've found that there are very few >>people with exposure to more than one configuration management system >>(actually, there are shockingly few people that have experience with *any* >>CMS); it helps to have the members of LOPSA to draw on for questions like >>this. >> >>- Leon >> >>On Mar 30, 2015, at 11:42 PM, Dennis wrote: >> >>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 9:41 PM, Brandon Allbery <allber...@gmail.com> >>> wrote: >>>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 12:27 AM, Leon Towns-von Stauber <leo...@occam.com> >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> I would use Salt when I need to build full application stacks >>>>>> including many dependent types of systems, and don't need to manage >>>>>> the state of the systems. >>>>> >>>>> This isn't the only place I've heard Salt described as more of an >>>>> imperative system (i.e. "Do this"), as opposed to a system that describes >>>>> a >>>>> desired state (i.e. "Make it like this"), which CFEngine does so well. >>>>> >>>>> However, having started to look at Salt, I don't really get the criticism >>>>> (if you take it as one). Based on limited exposure so far, it seems just >>>>> as >>>>> capable as CFEngine or Puppet of specifying a desired configuration and >>>>> executing on it; it doesn't seem all that different in overall philosophy. >>>>> For anyone familiar with the issue, what am I missing? Or, perhaps, is >>>>> that >>>>> description of Salt based on earlier versions, the shortcomings of which >>>>> have been addressed in current releases? >>>> >>>> >>>> Pretty much, yes; it's had the capability for a year or so, but it's still >>>> "newish". (Earlier versions supported one "state", which de facto ended up >>>> being "do these things" as opposed to "make the system look like this", as >>>> I >>>> understand it. Some of the tutorials and documentation still assume that's >>>> how you use it.) >>> >>> Realistically you can use both, or neither. >>> >>> I can't comment on what was wrong with the state system back then for >>> that to come up though. >>> >>> I do want to point out that Salt State files are very easy on the eyes >>> compared to CFE promises. >>> >>> http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/starting_states.html >>> >>> Also you can template them, one Pythonic example being: >>> http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/renderers/all/salt.renderers.pyobjects.html >>> >>> If everyone has more experience with CFE on the team then why switch? >>_______________________________________________ >>Tech mailing list >>Tech@lists.lopsa.org >>https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech >>This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators >> http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > Tech@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ -- Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard. --Atom Powers-- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
