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Hi |
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> I'm starting to put together a portage/stable server configuration for a large |
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> number of gentoo VM's that will eventually be hosted on a VMware ESX 4.1U1 |
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> cluster - with the goal of limiting major changes to once/year and otherwise |
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> only applying security/minimum necessary updates. I doubt it will be easy but |
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> I'm doing my best at it :) |
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This sounds very interesting. I haven't yet plugged through your blog, |
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but just to chime in: |
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I maintain a, likely much smaller, number of VMs using linux vservers. |
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The approach here is to almost cut each machine down to a chroot that |
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runs only one (or thereabouts) interesting service. To do this I have |
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found customised portage profiles to be the under-plugged secret since |
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they allow you to basically push a set of packages which should be |
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installed and control "per type of vm" use flags and package keywords |
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(eg I have www-nginx, www-apache, mail, proxy, mysql, ftp, etc |
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profiles). Additionally I have a small overlay of local ebuilds that |
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sit in the same tree |
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Up until now I haven't really made any effort to sync this whole tree |
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across multiple physical machines and it's a bit of an ad-hoc process. |
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Using something like git would probably be perfect |
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The still missing step is configuration management across the machine |
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types, eg I want to upgrade all my "Apache-WWW" class machines and merge |
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in all changes in /etc in a certain way... At the moment I just run |
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dispatch-conf across all machines, but it can be quite boring merging 20 |
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instances of sshd.conf... Seems like Puppet/Chef could be a solution |
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here, but the step up and investment to make it work seems pretty large? |
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It does appear like managing large numbers of virtual machines is one |
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are that gentoo could score very well? Interested to see any chatter on |
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how others solve this problem, or any general advocacy? Probably we |
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should start a new thread though... |
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Regards |
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Ed W |