i had to write my own database and RESTful API into it. and cfengine integration with a database is effing annoying, i would avoid cfengine like the plauge if i had to do it all over again.
i would also use a REST-JSON interface rather than REST-XML if you do this, you also need to separate in the database the logical host information from the hardware host information. if you convert a box from a foo-app01 box to a bar-app01 box the hardware information doesn't change and the physical server carries over the same identity, but you want to pick up a different logical config as the box is now in a different role. that leads to what we loosely think of as a "host" being spread across two different tables. i saw this done accidentally at my last job where the logical host configuration information was done in LDAP, and a different loosely-coupled MySQL database was used for tracking hardware information. at my current job, i started using a "hosts" table for hardware-information, thinking that i'd just build that one table out for both purposes, but wound up having to create a "logical_hosts" table for all the logical config information. and one trick to consider is that if you've got APIs that return lists of hosts, particularly that might be used to list all hosts, that its generally better to "select * from hosts" and store the objects in a cache rather than potentially doing thousands of individual SQL requsts. the database will probably be small enough to fit entirely in memory on the database server, but the overhead of thousands of requests takes a long time. i did something hackish to implement this, and later found that the ORM layer i used had support for caching database objects that i should have used. On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, A. Rich wrote: > dredd> What sorts of "VM-specific" things are you thinking of? ie., from the > dredd> perspective of something "running inside the VM", what is there that > dredd> the configuration management software would even be able to see/detect/ > dredd> manage? > > dredd> What challenge are you trying to overcome? > > Specifically, something that is aware of what physical host that a vm resides > on so that it can tie into things like being able to track serial console > access, hardware contract numbers, PDU/network/fibre/rack allocation etc, and > know when a machine relocates using vmotion or other similar technology. > > A tool that will do all of this would be optimal, but I have a feeling that > asset tracking + change control + config management isn't something that's out > there right now. > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
