On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 5:42 PM, James Turnbull <ja...@lovedthanlost.net> wrote: > > 2009/10/27 Cameron <cr...@kojeware.com>: >> >> I was wondering how Puppet relates to the DMTF's CIM. AFAICT there is >> a clear connection between the two, but I see very little discussion >> on the topic on the list. > > Why do I sense a university dissertation... :) >
You rang? :) CIM has been a somewht-regular topic at LISA's Configuration Management Workshop (although I haven't attended those since I left my job as a university professor). One of the authors of the CIM was at one of the workshops, and she agreed that CIM could be understood as an upgrade of certain SNMP MIBs for today's systems, mostly aimed at the SNMP/RMON community, not really at the problem Systems Administrators are usually trying to solve. I know of no Open Source Configuration Management products that are significantly influenced by the CIM, although there are some commercial products that are, primarily because the commercial products are trying to 'sell to Enterprises', which already have an install base of SNMP-based 'management solutions', thus consider CIM as a Good Thing. SysAdmins, on the other hand, tend to want a tiny slice of what SNMP provides (i.e., only certain parts of a very few MIBs), and want more ability to configure systems than what SNMP was designed to deliver (i.e., while GET/PUT can certainly be used to construct interesting systems, it's too low level to be efficient; and that's not even considering many of the well-known issues with SNMP). In other words, Sysadmins like Puppet. :) (and cfengine, lcfg, isconf, quattor, bcfg2, chef, etc -- all of which are tools that deal with the space and problems that SysAdmins work with). > There are overlaps between the DMTF Common Information Model (or CIM) > - see http://www.dmtf.org/standards/cim/ - and Puppet but the > relationship is probably closer between the CIM and Facter. > It's both Facter and Puppet -- Facter has a Model built into it, Puppet has a Model built into it, and you're constructing a Model when you define classes: when people talk about sharing Puppet recipes, they are really trying to distill out something that roughly corresponds to a piece of CIM. It might help to think of Facter as the leaf nodes and Puppet as the internal nodes in a CIM-like model. It would be an interesting exercise (perhaps a decent Master's project or Capstone) to take the CIM and Facter+Puppet, do a Gap Analysis, then modify Facter+Puppet to 'better cover an interesting area of CIM with Facter+Puppet'. Steven --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
