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Re: [LUG] puppet

 

On 06/01/13 18:38, Rob Beard wrote:
>
> I've had a look at the web site and it says about automation, and
> being able to have 10 clients with the free Enterprise version, but
> I'm wondering if the Open Source version is any good or is it one of
> those things where if you want the nice features you either have to
> code them yourself or pay for the enterprise version?
>
> Rob
>

The enterprise version has nice bells and whistles on it, a neat
installer, proper commercial support and costs a fair chunk of money. As
you've spotted, you can download the enterprise version and manage up to
10 nodes with it (they count VMs as 'nodes' as well, not just the
physical boxes, so you can't just stick 100 VMs each on 10 big boxes and
sidestep them that way) but I'm not sure if that's time limited or not.

Puppet are pretty cool about not being dicks though, and you're not
really going to miss much by just rolling with the properly free version
(they don't intentionally cripple it). Both versions are open source so
if you're not averse to getting your hands dirty, you can really dig
about in the code and hack up stuff yourself. Actually, one ex-customer
of mine tried to persuade me to 'unlock' the enterprise trial version to
remove the restrictions so they didn't have to pay for it: I refused of
course, and that's why they are now an ex-customer.

Really you're only going to miss the neatly integrated dashboard
controls (think, web based configurator and monitoring tool), some
automation/discovery stuff, etc which I personally find to be a very
nice to impress non-technical people like managers who want reports and
so on, but essentially only distracts me from getting proper work done.
With a bunch of basic cron jobs and shell scripts you'll be perfectly ok
with the regular version.

If your experience with Puppet is anything like mine though (pretty much
completely positive, which is quite unusual for me!) and depending on
the size of your company and the depth of their pockets, I wouldn't be
surprised if after you've really got into depth with Puppet you end up
quite happily paying them their well deserved money.

Another related tool (a bit more windows-esque) that I don't get on
quite so well with, but my fellow sysadmins think I'm insane for not
absolutely loving, is spiceworks, which you might also like to take a
look at. It's also free, but only in terms of money. Just thought I'd
throw that out there.

http://www.spiceworks.com/

Cheers

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