Today CFEngine releases the latest version of its commercial enterprise software for configuration management and IT operations.
In addition to all the usual power of scalable and convergent system configuration, CFEngine 3 Nova brings a higher level of information awareness to system administrators at very low cost.
Resource efficiency takes on a new importance as users increasingly work in the Cloud where every CPU cycle is billed. The CFEngine mantra of “Lightweight! Lightweight! Lightweight!” has pushed the new release even further in the direction of resource efficiency. Considerable improvements in network efficiency have also been achieved, allowing reporting of many thousands of hosts every 5 minutes to a single hub aggregator - far in advance of other solutions.
CFEngine no longer supports the conversion tool for upgrades from CFEngine version 2 to 3. Manual intervention was still needed after its usage, and a simple, direct translation can be a poor choice that misses the opportunity for improvement. We recommend following the Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to 3 guide, alternatively in combination with Professional Services from CFEngine to provide a ‘best effort’ conversion.
CFEngines 1 & 2 CFE3 Community Core CFE Nova World-wide deployment Consistent extensible syntax Introducing Knowledge Management Technology leader Enhanced configuration modelling Scalable reporting Brought convergent repair Lists, patterns, methods Native windows support User extensible without scripts SQL, LDAP integration Fault tolerance features CFDB searchable knowledge bank Generalized package model Spreadsheet model for content driven policies Simplified installation and upgrade Packaging Product integration Support
Following the development of the community standard library, CFEngine has now released a conversion utility that transforms existing CFEngine 2 policies into a basic CFEngine 3 format. The output can be run in either the Community Edition, CFEngine Nova or any other version of CFEngine going forward.
Earlier this year, CFEngine released an upgrade manual for community users. Now with the core transformation utility, commercial customers will be able to save potentially hundreds of hours of conversion time on a large installation of cfengine, moving to version 3.
Following a sustained effort by the programming team at CFEngine AS, CFEngine Nova (the commercial version of CFEngine 3) will run natively on Windows NT platforms (not merely emulated under the Cygwin framework), with first release just into the new year 2010. Support has been added for registry management and Windows Access Control Lists, as well as integration with Event Manager and other goodies.
The plans over the next year include further integration of CFEngine with Active Directory and its group policies. CFEngine still has something to offer Windows users, even with the new tools that Microsoft is bringing to Windows 2008. One thing is integration of Windows resources into the CFEngine Knowledge Map, but also there is the ability to manage security through ACLs, and implement group policies convergently over time (not just one-off), as well as to integrate with a major Unix management system in a universal framework. Early rumours of the release have already led to a flurry of interest for the upcoming software release from a number of companies internationally.
