Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software.
It does not take long for users to recognize that setting up more than a couple of machines is extremely time consuming. System administrators realize this extremely early in their career. The ability to deploy additional servers or to replace failed servers without fuss and bother is important if business applications are to keep running, and the pressure falls squarely on the system administrator. Server provisioning tools come to the rescue.
However, the difficulty is that operating systems have thousands of components with different interfaces for different components. This means that an automated provisioning tool is a complex beast especially if you consider the tasks that are involved in provisioning a server. These include the installation of an operating system, kernel modules, middleware and applications. Further, the organization will want the system customized to their requirements such as deploying machines with specific roles such as web servers, email servers, with appropriate partitioning and packages. The server will also need to be appropriately configured for the network.
Fortunately, there are a number of sophisticated tools available for Linux that are adept in provisioning servers, offering the ability to simultaneously set up thousands of machine unattended.
To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 12 desirable server provisioning tools. We have ranked them in our order of preference, with FAI, Foreman, Cobbler, and m23 carrying our highest recommendation. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for any system administrator that needs to set up many servers as quickly as possible.
Click the links in the table below to learn more about each tool.
| Server Provisioning | |
|---|---|
| FAI | High quality tool for fully automatic installation of Linux systems |
| Foreman | Life cycle systems management tool |
| Cobbler | OS provisioning and profile management |
| m23 | Software distribution and management system |
| MAAS | Data centre automation platform |
| Confluent | Handle essential bootstrap and operation of scale-out server configurations |
| xCAT | Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit |
| OpenQRM | Systems management platform |
| Uyuni | Configuration and infrastructure management solution |
| Warewulf | Stateless, network-boot cluster provisioning system |
| Tinkerbell | Bare metal provisioning engine |
| Ironic | OpenStack service for managing and provisioning bare metal servers |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
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