Hi all,
I'm happy to announce the first release of a new plugin Dmitri Dolguikh and I have been working on recently. foreman_mco enabled users to manage remote actions across large numbers of hosts using the popular MCollective framework. The plugin is currently in an alpha-quality state although we are working to quickly add new features and enhance existing functionality; the first stable release will be timed for the 1.4 release of Foreman. It's not recommended to use this plugin in production systems yet because there are a few known security issues that we have yet to work out. The plugin currently only supports service & package management, but one of the most important features that we will be adding in the next few weeks is the ability to utilize any MCollective agent using a feature we're calling 'agent discovery'. This will allow dynamic UI's generated using MCollective's discovery and input validation.
There is a setup guide we've put together here [1] that explains the individual pieces for setting up the infrastructure required by the plugin. It currently uses sidekiq to execute jobs and you need to setup Redis on a machine + workers on nodes that are connected to the collective you wish to orchestrate. Additionally, there is a version of the proxy in a git repo that you'll need to setup on a machine that has access to Redis and is configured to be part of a collective. There is a complete setup guide here [1] with all the steps to get each setup properly. We'll be working on adding support for setting up MCollective as part of the foreman-installer for 1.4.
If you're using an RPM-based distro that will be supported for the 1.4 release (EL 6 or Fedora 19), the package is available in the nightly plugin repository. Check out the plugin installation guide [2] for instructions on setting up the yum repo. You'll still need to setup the proxy and run workers from the git instructions in the setup guide, though. Debian-based distros must run completely from source for now.
Let me know if you've got any questions or hit any issues. Dmitri and I are in #theforeman and #theforeman-dev on freenode if you want to debug in real-time.
-Sam