Foreman

@ohadlevy
ohadlevy@gmail.com

Foreman's Realm

A typical system life cycle

Installation

Initial

configuration

Updates and drift

management

Foreman is

A complete life cycle management tool

for physical and virtual servers

Provisioning

Configuration

Monitoring

Provisioning

Provision on bare metal

private or public cloud

all from one interface

with one process

Configuration

A complete configuration management

solution including

Puppet ENC with built-in

support for parameterized classes

and hierarchical parameter store

Monitoring

Inventory and activity

based on Puppet or Chef

reports and facts

Including configuration status

distribution and trends

Foreman architecture

Configuration

management

Smart-Proxy

Compute

Environments

UI , API and CLI

Smart Proxies

Smart proxy help Foreman orchestrate
the process of commissioning a new host.
It is located on the network segment of the
server that perform the specific function.

Smart Proxies can control
DNS, DHCP, TFTP, Puppet CA and BMC

Config Management

Reports, facts, classes and environments are
imported from the Puppet Master / Chef Server.
Foreman serves as a node classifier and
parameter store for the puppet master.
Foreman can manage multiple Puppet masters
and Puppet environments.

Compute Resources

Foreman manages bare metal systems
as well as RHEV-M, oVirt, EC2, VMware,
OpenStack, RackSpace, Google Compute
Engine and libvirt.

Compute Resources

Foreman offers a unified interface to all the major

compute providers

Using Fog to abstract the communication details
Compute profiles to abstract hardware flavors
Host-groups to describe the OS & puppet config

Host groups

Operating System
Puppet configuration
Compute profile

A host-group is hierarchical system definition.
Foreman can provision systems or images from a
host-group on each of the compute resources.
A host-group contains definition of:

Image Creation

Foreman can create images from host-groups
on each compute provider.
Automate image creation based on policies:
If package updates takes too long, it's probably
a good time to create an upto-date image.