I attended the LISA 07 Birds of a Feather (BoF) on Configuration Management led by Luke Kanies of Puppet tonight. He defines Puppet as the infrastructure to manage your infrastructure.
A straw poll of about 50 attendees (who were Large Installation Systems Administrators) indicated that they used the following tools for configuration management.
- Puppet – 2
- BCfg2 – 2
- Cfengine – 15
- Homebrewed – 16
- Shared Homebrew – 2
- LCFG – 1
- Opsware – 0
- BladeLogic – 0
20 of the attendees were actively looking to replace their infrastructure for configuration management. The highest response was for home brewed tools. I think that speaks to the complexity of the issue of configuration management its hard to create a tool that meets everyone’s needs. I was also surprised at how well represented open source tools were over the commercial tools but at the end of the day there seemed to be very few tools that had universal appeal. Though after speaking with Luke and the users of his tools it seems like Puppet has a good a story as any.
Update: Luke pointed out my tagging was probably a little incomplete, updated 11/24/07
cfengine users and makers of their own home brewed solutions should also take a look at NetDirector – http://www.netdirector.org
a big difference between it and many of the other tools listed is that it offers the option of a GUI for Admins that prefer that.