Oh, great and powerful big brain, I've recently started a new contract position where I've been asked to help modernize the Unix engineering teams practices. This environment has grown primarily by acquisition and is pretty much 10 years behind the times. It's a mixed AIX (static, 150 workloads) and RedHat (strategic, growing, about 350 workloads) environment.
They still think of themselves as a mom and pop shop, everything is done by hand and lots of one off scripts, even account management is handled locally on the servers. They are making some strides from an operational standing, they have Zabbix for their primary monitoring, Tripwire Professional is being installed for security on regulatory systems, Splunk had recently been purchased for centralized logging and management, and they are deciding on an AD bridge solution (Dell or Centrify, although they are leaning towards Dell). Management has suddenly gotten dashboard happy and want to be able to easily see what servers are company with regulations (SOX, PCI) best practices and/or internal standards, which have been patched recently, etc. The two places they still need the most help are provisioning and configuration management. They have no real tools or standards in place. They've got NIM and Satellite 5 setup, but more often than not, they clone an existing system and then reconfigure it by hand. My main focus is CM for both, then provisioning for Linux since AIX is pretty static. I was initially looking at using Puppet, then started looking to add either Razor or Foreman for provisioning. At Ohio Linux Fest this weekend, I learned that Satellite 6 is Foreman, Puppet, and Katello. However, as I started digging a little deeper, I realized that AIX is only supported with Puppet Enterprise, which is not integrated and compatible with Satellite. I could switch the design to PE, buy since they already pay for Satellite, it seems wasteful. I know Foreman/S6 can plug in other tools like chef or ansible, so that might be a way to go instead. What do others do in this kind of mixed environment? -spp Sent from my iPad _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
