Hi,
I’m trying to come up with a way to use Foreman Katello for our setup (have been for a long time, actually, but never got around doing it seriously).
Both for provisioning and for content-management (“updates”).
Background: we have a couple of hundred hosts, with a mixture of (a few) RHEL, (some more) CentOS 7, 8 (future unknown for to obvious reasons, some I’ll probably convert/reinstall to RHEL), Ubuntu 18+20 (and FreeBSD, but they’re out of scope for this question anyway). These hosts are either bare metal, VMWare VMs, or OpenStack VMs.
We also have our own OpenStack installation, but this is controlled almost 100% by OpenStack tools (ironic etc.pp.) and it’s unlikely that the group who runs this would want to change their workflow.
(Side note: a different group already went and bought Satellite Server, which they are using mostly for patching last time I asked - we could probably use that to manage our RHELs, but AFAIK Satellite Server does not really support anything but RHEL) and we’d still need a solution for non-RHEL.
Anyway - all these servers sit compartmentalized in multiple dozens of different VLANs behind (physical) firewalls (typical “old-school” MSP setup, if you want), sometimes in different switching-domains. There’s not really a management-LAN for them that they all share - the office-network is the management-network in effect.
There’s sometimes only a one or two servers in a VLAN (reverse-proxy or WAF).
Until I think Ubuntu 18, the Ubuntu servers were setup with a simple homegrown pxe-boot setup through a single, enterprise-wide PXE-boot VLAN, that was mapped to the host either via VMWare or via switch-setup (bare metal).
With Ubuntu 20, this did not work any longer and thus these servers are setup manually (except on Openstack where we use ansible or create them from images via openstack cli commands).
CentOS servers are still setup via Cobbler (no effort has been made to install Ubuntu via Cobbler), but the server is CentOS 7 and it shows its age (and I really want to move to something more “modern”, like Foreman.
Now, we (our group) do not control the switches, nor the Vcenter(s - yes, we have 20-ish of those, too, all slightly different…) - thus we cannot create VMs directly but only via opening a ticket.
For updating, we have our own mirror(s) of Ubuntu + CentOS repos, which we create weekly (and quarterly) “branches” off those we apply updates via ansible (or manually).
I would like to minimize the amount of SmartProxies to use - but last time I looked Foreman wasn’t really geared towards doing installation via a temporary PXE-boot VLAN such as what we currently have.
For content-management, it should not be a problem as I just have to give the Smart-Proxy a public IP and allow traffic to it from the clients. But how do you do DHCP/PXE?
Any advice?