A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
In [the previous post](http://www.cloudcomp.ch/2012/06/automating-the-icclab-part-two/) we looked at getting Foreman setup and installed. In this post we’ll run through how you can provision bare metal hosts using Foreman. The first thing that we’ll need to do is configuring Foreman for provisioning!
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.