Foreman, Puppet and OpenStack

So all our work in the previous articles has been leading up to this one. In this article we’ll describe how you can deploy a full multi-node [OpenStack](http://www.openstack.org) cluster beginning from bare metal using [Foreman](http://www.theforeman.org) and [puppet](http://www.puppetlabs.com). Before continuing we should note what exactly ‘bare metal’ is in this context. Bare metal refers to physical server hardware that has not yet been provisioned with an operating system. When provisioning this bare metal, it is assumed that the underlying network has been setup (e.g. L2 configurations).



Automating The ICCLab: Part One

In the world of data centres, automation is not a nice-to-have it’s essential. Sure you could attempt some manual deployment and configuration if you’ve 2 machines to administrate or knock together a custom script in Perl or python if you’ve 30 machines. But what happens when this grows to thousands? This is where the likes of [Puppet](http://puppetlabs.com/), [Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/) and [CFEngine](http://cfengine.com/) come into play. These are the tools for managing deployment of cloud-scale data centres.