FAI
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a high quality tool for
fully
automatic installation of new Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, Debian and other
Linux systems (single computer or a whole cluster) via network, custom
install cd, or into a chroot environment.
FAI is used for maintaining chroot environments, virtual
machines as well as physical boxes in setups ranging from a few single
systems up to deployments of large-scale infrastructures and clusters
with several thousands of systems.
FAI can also be used for configuration management of a running
system.
Features include:
- Fast to deploy
- A tool for automated unattended installation
- Daily maintenance by updating running system without
reinstallation
- Easy-to-use centralized management system for your Linux
deployment
- Scalable. FAI users manage their computer infrastructures
starting from a few computers up to several thousands of machines
- Different hardware and different configuration
requirements are easy to establish using FAI
- Using the FAI class concept, you can group a bunch of
similar machines
- Installation targets: desktops, servers, notebooks,
Beowulf cluster, rendering or web server farm, Linux laboratory or
classroom
- Linux rollout, mass installation and automated server
provisioning are additional topics of FAI
- FAI is lightweight. No special daemons are running, no
database setup
is needed
- Full remote control via ssh during installation process
- Used for daily maintenance,
and can set up chroot environments
- Shell, Perl, expect and cfengine script support for
customization
- Full remote control via ssh during installation process
- Compared to tools like kickstart or cobbler for Red Hat,
autoyast for SUSE or
Jumpstart for SUN Solaris, FAI is much more flexible. You can tune
every
small part of your configuration to your local needs using hooks
- Useful for XEN and Vserver host installations
- GUI for FAI using GOsa:
- GOsa provides a graphical interface for FAI
- GOsa is a PHP based administration tool for managing
systems in LDAP
- FAI config space is completely put into LDAP
- Config space can be managed using GOsa
Return
to Server Provisioning Home Page
Last Updated Sunday, April 01 2012 @ 11:50 AM EDT
| 
