System management tools


When I was studying for my RHCE exam, I came across a number of references to Redhat’s satellite server and its opensource spacewalk counterpart. To dig into these products a bit more, I recently attended Redhat’s deployment and systems management class. I’ve been using satellite server for the past two years, and it’s actually a really useful tool for managing configuration data and systems updates in data centers that solely run Redhat Enterprise Linux. Satellite server provides a number of handy features:

The commercial version of satellite server will set you back some serious cheddar, but luckily for us satellite server is based off the spacewalk opensource implementation. Spacewalks seems to have a pretty decent following, and it provides an easy way to manage CentOS and Fedora machines.

There are roughly a dozen systems management products that I want to test out this year, several of which are wrappers around puppet. Once I give spacewalk a good beating, I am going to shift gears and start looking at The Foreman. The Foreman appears to have everything I’ve been looking for in a configuration management and provisioning suite, and the fact that it can provision Solaris hosts intrigues me. Only time will tell if it works though!

Which packages or tools are you using to manage (provision, configuration management, monitor) your Linux hosts?

This article was posted by Matty on 2011-05-15 08:53:00 -0400 -0400