Recently a customer asked us to improve their current automation setup and centralize the Configuration management . They required a flexible system, fast, scalable and easy to maintain.
We drew up a proposal built around the open source project puppet in combination with ldap and subversion. We implemented a flexible setup with complete automation of their servers; using the ldap as backend for the user accounts, rights and server configurations.
We set the ldap up to serve a tree with groups like development/staging/production and a separate tree for webservers, db servers, fileservers and so on. By changing the settings in the ldap, a host from group for example, and running a puppet update; the changes are automatically executed for the relevant servers.
This is the great strength of puppet!
A side effect to this setup is the speed. Installing a fresh server from scratch to ready for the production takes about 15 minutes.
Its Unlimited Scalability!
The subversion side of the setup was implemented for configuration revision control. Thus tracking all changes and as an added bonus also creating a backlog of what is changed and by who.
Our client is very satisfied with our setup and we have, since our initial implementation, set up 3 different environments with each more than 60 servers. We are planning the migration of several hundred more servers to this setup.
We got a question from a customer for a good backup solution. The backup software we propose the most to our customers is Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver).
The feature that sold it to our customer was the setup and forget, which many of our customers love, after testing the restore of course.
We provided the right parameters after setting up the server, the dumpcycle (number of days), the tapecycle (number of tapes), the runspercycle (number of times the backup needs to run in the dumpcycle) and some other small modifications and you're done.
Schedule the backup and Amanda will decide when to do full, incremental or differential backups.
Based on the companies specific setup, we advised the client to use the virtual tape ability, something he liked a lot. It's easy to provide virtual tapes to amanda. Virtual tapes are tapes that reside on disk and not on physical tapes. Amanda mostly uses tar to create the backups.
Amanda provides the needed commands to manipulate the tapes and to do easy recovery.
You can find more information about Amanda on http://www.amanda.org.
Amanda also has commercial products (Zmanda cloud backup, Recovery Manager), which includes additional features.
