Using Foreman For Bare Metal Provisioning (2/N)

We've got a testbed for Foreman in place, so let's see what it takes to get it up and running. I'll be following the CentOS 7 instructions from the Quickstart Guide.

First, some preliminaries:

• Make sure that you have enough RAM allocated to the VM. I tried to do this with a 1G VM (the default for 64-bit RedHat under VirtualBox) and got OOM errors.
• The Foreman installer wants the FQDN (as returned by facter fqdn) to match the output of hostname -f. An easy way to do that for the purpose of experimentation is to edit /etc/hosts and replace the existing loopback entry with 127.0.0.1 foreman.localdomain foreman.
• Ensure that the host firewall is off: systemctl disable firewalld; iptables -F.

Installation is very easy:

# yum -y install https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet5/puppet5-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
...
# yum -y install http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
...
# yum -y install https://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.20/el7/x86_64/foreman-release.rpm
...
# yum -y install foreman-installer
...
# foreman-installer
...
  Success!
  * Foreman is running at https://foreman.localdomain
      Initial credentials are admin / 8pqUnEHJ2znCcUVC
  * Foreman Proxy is running at https://foreman.localdomain:8443
  * Puppetmaster is running at port 8140
  The full log is at /var/log/foreman-installer/foreman.log

The Foreman team should get credit for doing a good job automating the process. One thing I noticed immediately, and which explains the care taken with automating installation, is that Foreman is fairly complex. The following services are running on the VM post-installation:

• Puppet server
• Postgres
• Apache
• Passenger

Non-trivial, to say the least.

Having reviewed the Foreman manual, especially section 4.4 on Provisioning, it also seems like just getting a client to PXE-boot is very involved (see "4.5.2 Success Story" for required CLI commands), and this subsequent client handling is Puppet-centric.

Honestly, at this point I just want to have a client come up and register itself with a server, maybe get a description of what hardware is available and that sort of thing. I'd really prefer to defer decisions about operating systems and CM systems until after that. Foreman seems like its too involved for the moment; I'm not rendering a permanent judgement on it yet, but I do want to set it down and see what else is out there.