Puppet users - Apr 2010 - Modelling different aspects of a datacenter

Hi,

Just a survey how you guys model different aspects of your systems. I
mean: in my world every node is determined by 3 factors:
-> role in the datacenter (like www-server, workernode, db-server,
etc.)
-> website membership (I run several different websites with different
webserver configs, db, etc.)
-> hardware (can be, vmware, xen, hp, dell, ibm etc.)

(some of you might have 4th factor - operating system)
So every server is a combination of the above.

What techniques do you apply to combine them efficiently. I do it like
that (though I don''t know if it is optimal).

-> For roles I use generic classes like: www::generic. (in which I
have plain apache installed & running)
-> For websites I use subclasses which inherit from the generic class
(www::$website_name inherits www::generic)
-> For hardware I use facts and conditionals to determine hardware
platform & apply different stuff depending on it

I read about different techniques to tackle this stuff. For example
use parameters and templates to generate http configs for your
websites.

My question is how you have this kind of setup done.

-Regards


--
checkout my blog: linuxdatacenter.blogspot.com

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Most people will use a "node" classification tool. In my specific case
I use a combination of a node classifier, and standardized DNS naming  
conventions. For hardware related items, you have custom facts,  
dmiedecode etc etc. Really you will always hit the "one-off" bug of a
system when it comes to "standard" builds, it''s just a matter
of
lowering the "one-off" percentage as much as possible that makes  
environments much easier to manage.

Out of the box, puppet can be extremely dynamic as long as you have a  
creative way of figuring things out (dns naming conventions). But  
whenyou ultimately need to know that between two php sites  
(a.com,b.com) an external classifier works best (or a custom fact)
Try things out and see what works for you.
-jason

On Apr 20, 2010, at 9:02 PM, linuxdatacenter  
<linuxdatacenter@gmail.com> wrote:
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