This post is part of a blog series which tries to simplify the adoption of configuration management frameworks.

Getting a fully automated data center in a bigger company which does not yet have an “automation friendly culture” is very hard. Setting up a company wide configuration management framework like Puppet, Chef or Cfengine can take ages. Additionally I experienced some engineers, who are not involved in the setup of configuration management framework itself, think they should wait until the framework is 100% established. Earliest after that they plan to start thinking how they can automate their repetitive tasks.

I think this “waiting” is a huge waste of time. Everybody can start understanding and automating their repetitive tasks already without the availability of a central company wide automation framework. In this post I will cover how the Remote Execution framework Fabric can be used to basically automate your SSH sessions.

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In the last post I discussed that the Golden Image approach still has its advantages even if you use configuration management frameworks like Puppet. But the success and the quality of this approach depends heavily on the available tools. Solaris 11.2 ships with the new “Unified Archives” technology, which was newly developed from scratch. Therefore it should be a much better solution compared to “Flash Archives” from Solaris 10. I assume it was easier to build a better tool on Solaris 11, because base technologies like IPS, ZFS and SMF could be fully leveraged.

A nice introduction of “Unified Archives” (“UAs”) can be found on the Oracle blog of Jesse Butler.

With AI (Automated Installer) Solaris 11 already has an install service with many great features. But if you don’t use AI very often, it can easily look complex. In this post I will show, how to deploy global zones with a simpler method.

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This post is part of a blog series which tries to simplify the adoption of configuration management frameworks.

Many admins are already excited about configuration management frameworks like Puppet, that’s good! With these frameworks it is possible to implement all sorts of automation for many operating systems. But does this mean you should automate every task from the beginning to the end with a single tool?
If you can do it, then of course! It has some advantages, for example you need fewer different automation skills in the company. But there is always the big risk that automating a task takes just too long.

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