A Brief Comparison of Contemporary Provisioning Systems
Let's travel down into the bowels of the stack and see what's going on with provisioning systems these days. What with the predominance of cloud deployments the ability to mess with actual, physical hardware is something of a niche specialty. I can never tell exactly where I'm going to end up, though, so it pays to keep abreast of these sorts of things.
I did a bunch of Googling and turned up the following FOSS offerings:
A couple of these can be qual'd out after a brief review of their documentation:
- OpenQRM: Looks like mostly a commercial product with a community edition. I couldn't find source code or a wiki or anything like that.
- Satellite: This is RedHat's offering, and seems to be somewhat bound up with channels and RHN and all that jazz. Would rather avoid that, even if it's technically FOSS.
This still leaves us with a bevy of contenders. I spent some time combing through everyone's docs and pulled out what I think are some salient capabilities:
| Name | Actively Maintained? | Provisioning OSes | Bare Metal Provisioning? | VM Provisioning? | Cloud Provisioning? | Additional Commentary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cobbler | Y | Focused on RedHat and RedHat derivatives. | via PXE | N | N | |
| FAI | Y | Many Linux distros | via PXE | "Automated installation of virtual machines using KVM, XEN or VirtualBox and Vserver" | N | |
| Foreman | Y | "RHEL and derivatives (CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle Linux), Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, SLES, CoreOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, Juniper Junos, Cisco NX-OS" | via PXE | Y | Y | Heavyweight system, lots of effort to get started, Puppet-centric. See post here for evaluation to date. |
| MaaS | Y | "Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, and RHEL" | via PXE | N | N | |
| m23 | Y | "Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu" | via PXE | Y | N | |
| RackHD | No-ish | Many | via PXE | N | N | |
| Razor | Y | Many | via PXE | N | N | Easy to set up and get started with. Needs additional effort to make production-worthy. See detailed notes (1, 2, 3, 4) |
| Spacewalk | Y | Focused on RedHat and derivates | delegated to bundled Cobbler server | Y | N | |
| Stacki | Y | Many(?) | via PXE | N | N | |
| xCAT | Y | "RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, Oracle Linux, Windows, Esxi, RHEV, and more!" | via PXE | N | N |
Everyone does bare metal provisioning via PXE, so its not really a differentiator. What's going to set these various packages apart as I mess around with them are all the various bells and whistles and quality of life improvements that they do (or do not) implement: which OSes do they support, how to they handle handoff to configuration management systems, etc.
I think I'm going to start with Foreman, since it claims that it can not only do bare metal, but also virtualization and some cloud providers (see "5.2 Compute Resources"). That's sort of the holy grail, being able to get an OS up and running across bare metal, VM, and cloud, so if Foreman really performs as advertised that's a significant edge over other packages.
posted by GG at 8:15 PM
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