Managing Katello and Smart Proxies with Puppet modules

I’m looking for information/guides on managing our Katello infrastructure via the various “theforeman-” Puppet modules. Specifically around how doing so will affect the installer and application updates.

We run a split infrastrucure with one Foreman/Katello/Provisioning/Reporting host, two separate Puppetserver 5 Smart Proxies and one Puppet CA Smart Proxy. Puppetserver is not installed on the Katello host.

Up till now we have been managing everything by version managing katello-answers.yaml and foreman-proxy-content-answers.yaml, making changes to these as required and running the installer. This has worked pretty well but we are looking to integrate management of the Katello infrastructure into our Puppet system.

The Puppet modules themselves are pretty straightforward so far but I’m unsure how they will interact with the Foreman Installer and upgrades.

  1. Does moving to the Foreman Puppet modules supercede the Foreman Installer. Once using them should we stop using the installer?

  2. If that’s not the case will the installer take settings from the Puppet modules as it does from the answers file (if present)?

  3. How would using the Puppet modules affect updates? Would we need to change the appropriate module parameters then run the rake tasks manually?

If anyone could point me at any documentation or pointers on this it would be much appreciated.

Not sure about docs for this. As you mentioned Puppet modules are straightforward, with latest releases even allowing to split up Katello.

Yes, using it would supercede the installer, but if you really want you could also write the answer file to still use it. Keep in mind that results could still differ if versions of the Puppet modules are not adjusted correctly.

With the latest changes for 2.0.0 the packages do not run the rake tasks anymore, so yes. If you use the Puppet modules, workflow would be update the modules, adjust parameters if needed, update the packages, run rake tasks.

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Thanks @Dirk, we’ll get the modules implemented and tested then test the upgrade process. Once we have updates working I’ll write up a how to for it.