I've sort of become a Linux admin over the past few years working for a large healthcare provider. At my current employer they had 4 RHEL6 servers when I started here in 2014 and I've built another 44 servers and inherited another 10-15 (all EL 5,6,& 7). It's starting to get a little bit unwieldy to manage and I'm expecting to hit 100 linux servers by the end of 2016 at a minimum.
I built a Spacewalk server a few months ago and that helped alot with patching, but the configuration management sucks. I've also learned to not use Spacewalk to schedule reboots.
So in February I built a pulp server and switched Spacewalk from pulling it's repos from the internet to pulling everything in from pulp. This is a little redundant, don't you agree? But pulp is SO MUCH FASTER than Spacewalk at mirroring repos! Love Spacewalk for patching servers, so they both seem to have a place.
We're using VMWare vSphere 5.1 and working on upgrading to vsphere 6. With that in mind, what tools would you recommend for building VMs faster, more consistently, and easier to manage? There are so many tools to choose from. Right now I'm not using kickstart and not sure if I should since I'm using vmware templates or how exactly they would work together. Also OS guest customization seem to be broken in vsphere 5.1.
I'm seriously considering puppet, but will not be able to get any funding for licensing or support for anything I implement unless my employer is really impressed. We also have AIX & Solaris to support but working on getting rid of Solaris.
So again, for context, I work for a large healthcare provider. The apps are primarily postgres, apache, tomcat, and a few terminal apps. Lots of Oracle, but that's all on running on AIX (PowerVM). I'd mentioned vmware, but we are also using Solarwinds for monitoring.
Goals:
make templates leaner
have a more consistent environment (standardized postfix/sendmail config, all servers using same NTP.conf, etc)
start using newer technology where appropriate (docker?)
automate solarwinds snmp integration
centralized logging (graylog?)
continue improving on centralized management capabilities
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Anything I should focus on that I didn't mention?
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