p>When Ubuntu LTS Server Edition made the radical decision to offer Long Term (five year) support for its server edition software, it sparked the potential to make a significant impact on data center mangagement. Upgrading servers is one of the most disruptive operations in a data center because it means down-time. Now you might never have to take down a machine during its entire lifetime.
Perhaps a pipe dream? But, with a little luck, not so far from the truth
as you might think. Today, thanks to package management, the bulk of
patching and upgrading of a system can be done while the machine is
live. This means the prospect that one might actually avoid taking down
a machine to reinstall it for the entire life of the physical server is
actually within reach, assuming that no critical kernel patches are
needed.
Continuous maintenance and repair brings you closer
Such a long term approach requires some careful monitoring however. Machines can rarely survive for so long without some kind of pro-active maintenance. A traditional reactive model to incident handling will not cut it. To scale up to a large environment, CFEngine’s unique self-repair approach comes into play.
CFEngine is the original and still leading Configuration Management automation software, installed now on over a million machines world-wide and at some of the largest organizations. Originally dating back to 1993, it was completely renewed in 2008 in its 3.0.x series. The CFEngine software is available both in a fully Open Source Community Edition (3.0.5) and in enhanced Nova and Constellation commercial offerings. While the Community Edition is powerful enough in terms of capabilities, the commercial offerings aim to simplify configuration for enterprises, based on the concept of a Build Deploy Manage Audit lifecycle.
In short, CFEngine allows you to start with a generic `stem cell' machine (running, say, the Ubuntu Server edition), with the most basic installation. It can then customize and update the software without human intervention, based on policy. Unlike most management software, the story doesn’t end with installation though. It continues for the lifetime of the system, with five minute checks for compliance. As Mark Burgess, CTO and Founder of CFEngine quips, “You not just getting a roll of astro-turf and hoping for the best, CFEngine is a ‘round the clock groundskeeper that tends the garden and pulls the weeds.”
The new partnership between Canonical and CFEngine will surely be of great interest to those cramped datacenters that need lightweight and versatile tools to eke the maximum amount of utilization from the increasingly costly cubic feet.
