Provisioning

Provisioning is the term that is used as a "superset" of the term "OS installation". They talk about "server provisioning" (which means bare metal installation of OS, like kickstart) , user provisioning (which means creating user account on multiple servers), "patch provisioning" (which simply means patching of multiple servers :-), etc. But in reality "provisioning" is just fancy term with very little substance (aka corporate bullshit ;-) 

It does not bring too much additional clarity into the issues involved and as such have little value. 

Here is how Wikipedia defined the term:

In telecommunication, provisioning is the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide (new) services to its users. In NS/EP telecommunications services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.^[1]

In a modern signal infrastructure employing information technology at all levels, there is no distinction possible between telecommunications services and "higher level" infrastructure. Accordingly provisioning configures any required systems, provides users with access to data and technology resources, and refers to all enterprise-level information resource management involved.

But while the term is suspect,  the concept of specialized software that help to perform installation and patching in not. Early system like Solaris Jumpstart were extremely helpful for large server farms and created a lot of imitations such as Red Hat Kickstart and Suse Autoyast.

I would like to note, that provisioning often is treated like something really complex, the task that requires buying an expensive software from IBM or other big software vendor.  That's marketing propaganda.

In reality you can get 80% of the benefits using extremely simple tools, such as kickstart for installation, and some simple scripts with yum for patching multiple servers).

Expensive software vendor systems might have some edge if you need to support many different platforms, but even that is not given. Many such systems including one from IBM (old good TCM) are simply crap: complex with proprietary packaging and low reliability of delivery.  Often the presence of a complex provisioning package in corporate IT infrastructure can serve as a warning sign of the complete degeneration of corporate IT brass (aka Dilberalization).

If you are limited to Unix/Linux, then  native OS provisioning tools like AutoYaST, Kickstart, Jumpstart, Ignite and so on can do really good job with much less hassle. You do not need to buy anything and you can good a very return on small investment in learning vendor-supplied provisioning software.

Provisioning of OS, which is 50% of all provisioning business (another 50% is installation of patches and custom applications) is essentially a three step process.

• Installation of OS. The first step is installation of the OS and this can be done in various ways, with modified ISO (putting autoinst or anaconda-ks.cfg file in the root directory of the ISO as the most simple  way.
• Preparation of the system to providing the necessary services. The second step involves network configuration, running set of custom script which provide additional customarization depending on the server role and organization policies.
• Installation of the applications. Some of them like Web server, Samba, etc can be installed on step one, other like Oracle, backup agent, monitoring agent, etc  need to be installed separately.  

Please note that step two and three can be performed by any good software configuration management packages and some functions are also available from client-server monitoring systems like OpenView and job schedulers. 

For example, Oracle job scheduler is free, programmable and can help. 

But the main help is availability of SSH. With SSH you can perform pretty complex "provisioning" operations with simple scripts and that provides you with the level of flexibility that no proprietary system can match.  Even in Windows environment installation of SSH or dual boot with network boot to Unix partitions can solve many "provisioning problems" better then packages like "Managesoft".

See also Unix Configuration Management Tools

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20110623 : (R)ex - A simple framework to simplify systemadministration ( (R)ex - A simple framework to simplify systemadministration, Jun 23, 2011 )
• 20110614 : Spacewalk Free & Open Source Linux Systems Management ( Spacewalk Free & Open Source Linux Systems Management, Jun 14, 2011 )
• 20101215 : uranos 1.1675 ( uranos 1.1675, Dec 15, 2010 )
• 20101215 : FAI ( FAI, )
• 20101215 : xCAT ( xCAT, )
• 20101215 : Spacewalk by Red Hat ( Spacewalk, )
• 20101215 : Cobbler ( Cobbler, )
• 20101215 : m23 ( m23, )
• 20101215 : OpenQRM ( OpenQRM, )
• 200606 : 6 of the Best Free Linux Server Provisioning Tools - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site ( 6 of the Best Free Linux Server Provisioning Tools - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site, )

Old News ;-)

[Jun 23, 2011] (R)ex - A simple framework to simplify systemadministration

Features

• Simple definitions of tasks and profiles
• No need of an agent. You only need a ssh connection to your server.
• Run tasks parallel
• Easy customizable
• Currently supports Debian, Fedora, CentOS and OpenSuSE

Need Help?

• IRC: Join us on irc.freenode.net -> #rex
• Sign in to our mailinglist
• Bug Tracker on rt.cpan.org
• Wiki on GitHub

Some Examples

This command line example will execute "uptime" on all the given hosts (frontend01, frontend02, ...).

rex -H "frontend[01..15] middleware[01..05] db[01..04]" "say run 'uptime'"

[Jun 14, 2011] Spacewalk Free & Open Source Linux Systems Management

Open version of Red Hat Network.

Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution that allows you to:

• Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
• Install and update software on your systems
• Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
• Provision (kickstart) your systems
• Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
• Monitor your systems
• Provision and start/stop/configure virtual guests
• Distribute content across multiple geographical sites in an efficient manner.

[Dec 15, 2010] uranos 1.1675

uranos is a system to support unattended installation of several varieties of Linux (kickstart, preseed, autoyast) and Windows (W2k, XP, W2k3, Vista, 7, W2k8). It features inventory, software management,... DHCP-LDAP, DNS-LDAP, PHP-SSH, syslog-ng, switch managment, LDAP browser, and PXE management

Changes: Software is now able to handle also other OSes like Linux and Mac OS X. Software versions can now depend on architecture, OS, and OS version. Licence management was added. A free... text parser was added. Quwiki can generate Latex code for pdflatex

FAI

High quality tool for fully automatic installation of Linux systems. FAI can also be used for configuration management of a running system.

Support Sites:
FAI Guide, Man Pages, Mailing List, Wiki, Interview with Thomas Lange, DataCenter Deployment Control

Features include:

• Fast to deploy
• A tool for automated unattended installation
• Daily maintenance by updating running system without reinstallation
• Easy-to-use centralized management system for your Linux deployment
• Scalable. FAI users manage their computer infrastructures starting from a few computers up to several thousands of machines
• Different hardware and different configuration requirements are easy to establish using FAI
• Using the FAI class concept, you can group a bunch of similar machines
• Installation targets: desktops, servers, notebooks, Beowulf cluster, rendering or web server farm, Linux laboratory or classroom
• Linux rollout, mass installation and automated server provisioning are additional topics of FAI
• FAI is lightweight. No special daemons are running, no database setup is needed
• Full remote control via ssh during installation process
• Used for daily maintenance, and can set up chroot environments
• Shell, Perl, expect and cfengine script support for customization
• Full remote control via ssh during installation process
• Compared to tools like kickstart or cobbler for Red Hat, autoyast for SUSE or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris, FAI is much more flexible. You can tune every small part of your configuration to your local needs using hooks
• Useful for XEN and Vserver host installations
• GUI for FAI using GOsa:
  • GOsa provides a graphical interface for FAI
  • GOsa is a PHP based administration tool for managing systems in LDAP
  • FAI config space is completely put into LDAP
  • Config space can be managed using GOsa

xCAT Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit

Clients can run on any Perl compliant system.

Features include:

• Client/server architecture. Clients can run on any Perl compliant system. All communications are SSL encrypted.
• Role-based administration. Different users can be assigned various administrative roles for different resources
• New stateless and iSCSI support. Stateless can be RAM-root, compressed RAM-root, or stacked NFS-root. Linux software initiator iSCSI support for RH and SLES included. Systems without hardware-based initiators can still be iSCSI installed and booted
• Xen full virtualized support, including the rmigrate command to request live migration of a virtualized guest from one host to another
• Scalability. xCAT 2.x was designed to scale beyond your budget. 100,000 nodes? No problem with xCAT's Hierarchical Management Cloud (HMC). A single management node may have any number of stateless service nodes to increase the provisioning throughput and management of the largest clusters. All cluster services such as LDAP, DNS, DHCP, NTP, Syslog, etc... are configured to use the Hierarchical Management Cloud. Outbound cluster management commands (e.g. rpower, xdsh, xdcp, etc...) utilize this hierarchy for scalable systems management.
• Automagic discovery. Single power button press, physical location based, discovery and configuration capability
• Choice of database backend: SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Plug-in architecture for compartmental development. Add your own xCAT functionally to do what ever you want. New plug-ins extend the xCAT vocabulary available to xCAT clients
• Monitoring plug-in infrastructure to easily integrate 3rd party monitoring software into xCAT cluster. Plug-ins provided with xCAT: SNMP, RMC, Ganglia, Performance Copilot
• Notification infrastructure to be able to watch for xCAT DB table changes
• SNMP monitoring. Trap handler handles all SNMP traps
• Node status update (nodelist.status is updated during the node deployment, node power on/off process)
• Centralized console and systems logs
• Software/firmware inventory command to nodes. Software inventory to images
• Automatic installation of any additional rpms requested by the user during node deployment phase and after the nodes are up and running
• Supports a large number of operating systems

Spacewalk Systems management software developed by Red Hat

Spacewalk provides provisioning and monitoring capabilities. It enables you to kickstart systems, as well as to manage and deploy configuration files. Spacewalk's monitoring feature allows you to view monitoring status for your systems alongside their software update status. Spacewalk also has virtualization capabilities to enable you to provision, control, manage, and monitor virtual Xen guests.

Spacewalk works with RHEL, Fedora, and other RHEL derivative distributions like CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc.

Support Sites: Documentation, FAQ, Wiki, Mailing List, Red Hat Network Satellite

Features include:

• Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
• Install and update software on your systems
• Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
• Provision (kickstart) your systems
• Provision and start/stop/configure virtual guests
• Distribute content across multiple geographical sites in an efficient manner
• Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
• Monitor your systems

Cobbler OS provisioning and profile management

m23 Software distribution and management system

m23 is controlled via the web browser. The installation of a new m23 client is performed in three simple steps and the integration of existing clients is possible, too. Group functions and mass tools make managing a vast number of clients simple.

m23 is composed of a large number of open source components such as Etherboot, Apache, PHP, BusyBox, MySQL, DHCP, ATFTP and many more.

Features include:

• Web-based administration
• Three steps to your complete client
• Integration of existing clients into m23: Existing Debian systems can be assimilated into the m23 system easily and administered like a normal client (installed with m23)
• Group functions: Convenient group functions if you have a large number of clients that need to install new software or if other routine jobs need to be done. For example, a new software package can be installed on all clients or be removed from all clients of a group. In addition, an update or client recovery can be accomplished on all group members
• Mass installation: The mass installation tools are handy, if you need to install a big amount of clients with similar requirements
• Free partitioning and formatting
• Imaging: Installation using image files: An image file of a partition or entire harddisk can be used to install other clients. These image files are taken from installed clients with all their software packages and settings
• Support for software RAIDs: Partitions or entire harddrives can be combined into software RAIDs. m23 supports the RAID levels 0, 1, 4, 5, 6 and 10. RAIDs can be used like normal partitions to install operating systems to or to use them as swap or storage space
• NFS for storing home directories
• User management with LDAP: User accounts can be stored on a central LDAP server. This increases the ease of use in environments with many clients and a lot of users. The OpenLDAP server is shipped with the m23 server and can be administrated via the highly integrated phpLDAPadmin
• Pool builder: The pool builder makes it possible to combine software packages from different media (CD, DVD, internet) on the m23 server and convert them to a package source. These package sources can be used to install clients. This can be done without an internet connection or if the internet connection is rather slow. It is also possible to add self-made packages to the pool
• Client backup
• Client recovery
• Rescue system
• Graphical desktops: KDE, Gnome, XFce or pure X11
• Plugins

OpenQRM Systems management platform

openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT-infra structure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins.System RequirementsGNU GPL v2
Java Runtime Environment

Support Sites: Documentation, Forums, Demo, SourceForge Project Page, Mailing Lists Features include:

• Small and compact
• Easy to install
• Complete separation of "hardware" (physical servers and virtual machines) from "software" (server-images)
• Support for different virtualization technologies
• Fully automatic Nagios configuration (single click) to monitor all systems and services
• High-availability : "N to 1" fail-over !
• Ready-made-server-images via the image-shelf plugin
• Integrated storage management
  • NFS
  • Iscsi
  • Aoe/Coraid
  • NetApp
  • Local-disk (transferring server-images to the local-disk)
  • LVM-Nfs (NFS on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
  • LVM-Iscsi (Iscsi on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
  • LVM-Aoe (Aoe on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
• Support for all kinds of different deployment types
• Distribution support
• Developer friendly
• Support for multiple database types, e.g. MySQL, Oracle, DB2 and PostgreSQL

6 of the Best Free Linux Server Provisioning Tools - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site

Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software.

It does not take long for users to recognise that setting up more than a couple of machines is extremely time consuming. System administrators realise this extremely early in their career. The ability to deploy additional servers or to replace failed servers without fuss and bother is important if business applications are to keep running, and the pressure falls squarely on the system administrator. Server provisioning tools come to the rescue.

However, the difficulty is that operating systems have thousands of components with different interfaces for different components. This means that an automated provisioning tool is a complex beast especially if you consider the tasks that are involved in provisioning a server. These include the installation of an operating system, kernel modules, middleware and applications. Further, the organisation will want the system customized to their requirements such as deploying machines with specific roles such as web servers, email servers, with appropriate partitioning and packages. The server will also need to be appropriately configured for the network.

Fortunately, there are a number of sophisticated tools available for Linux that are adept in provisioning servers, offering the ability to simultaneously set up thousands of machine unattended.

Kickstart was created to enable system administrations a way of automating a Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation. Cobbler is a project from Red Hat that offers turnkey support for provisioning Kickstart files, and setting up the services on the system.

To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 6 desirable server provisioning tools. We have ranked them in our order of preference, with FAI and xCAT carrying our highest recommendation. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for any system administrator that needs to set up many servers as quickly as possible.

Now, let's explore the 6 server provisioning tools at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

Server Provisioning
FAI	High quality tool for fully automatic installation of Linux systems
xCAT	Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit
Spacewalk	Systems management software developed by Red Hat
Cobbler	OS provisioning and profile management (kickstart based)
m23	Software distribution and management system
OpenQRM	Systems management platform

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Provisioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Extensible Provisioning Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Last modified: March 29, 2020