I’m slowly getting to grips with Foreman 3.4.0 (with Katello). I’ve got local mirrors set up for CentOS and Ubuntu, I have plugins working for VMware integration and can import hosts that way (so far unmanaged).
However, I’m struggling with the many ways things can be done. I’m happy to see the documentation improving but still find myself confused when I come across old documentation as things have drastically changed since 3.0. While I’m waiting for feedback on my issues with getting a proxy deployed to an ISC server and IPAM API calls that fail towards Netbox, I thought I’d work on testing some deployments.
Any advice on whether it’s possible to have a universal approach to deploying servers across vSphere and cloud (Azure, OVH etc.)? Or should the approach be customised for each?
I’m completely new to automated machine deployments, so wouldn’t even know where to start with PXE etc. I see PXE, ISO and other types of installs. Is there documentation regarding which is best for certain type of deployments?
I prefer unattended installation over image-based provisioning to always get a clean system, but in your case this would be only an option for vSphere and all the cloud solutions would need images. So while some customization is always needed having two different approaches will likely mean many differences to learn.
As always it depends, PXE is perhaps the oldest solution and requires the most control over your network but gives you also the most simple and flexible one, Boot-disk is a good alternative if you have no control over the network and with vSphere integration it works also without much overhead.
Finding the best solution is always the most challenging for me when doing a new setup as most customers are also new to the topic but have existing environments and processes which need to be respected.
This is exactly why I’m hoping for a unified approach.
I need to keep my options open and less variations means less differences to support, even when I have full control over my network, I won’t have this in most cloud hosted environments.
For our downstream product, we have a more extensive introduction to different provisioning methods that might be interesting to you (next to the provisioning hosts guide):
