A while back I emailed out a survey to Cobbler users to better understand a bit about what they manage and other management tools they use. Here are the distilled results. 18 people responded. For comparison, we have over 200 people on the mailing list so this is a small section, but still a very good sample size. I have mixed up the responses so you can not really infer anything from the order of the answers to each question.
------ (A) How many cobbler objects do you have of each type? cobbler distro list | wc -l cobbler profile list | wc -l cobbler system list | wc -l cobbler repo list | wc -l ANSWER Anywhere from 2 to 24 seperate distributions are managed by each cobbler server. The average is about 9, high is 24. Most people have between 1.5 and 2x as many profiles as they have distributions, the high is 25. The average number of system records is 60, though since systems can be installed via profile this does is not a useful metric for determining how many systems cobbler manages, hence question B -- yet the high is an impressive 257 (you can have thousands of systems installed via cobbler and only create system records for critical systems -- in a grid configuration most likely you would just use profiles). The average number of repositories being managed by Cobbler is 10, though some folks are managing a suprisingly high number of repositories -- 30, 50, or 60, while a handful are not using Cobbler to manage their yum repositories. My main takeaway for this is that the "cobbler system" object is still very important, and people are still interested in the customizations it makes possible. This is good, because that was my reason for asking the question -- people aren't just using profiles and stopping there. I'm also surprised to see the yum repo management features are being used a lot more widely than I thought, which is good, so we should possibly spend more time on those in the future. ------ (B) About how many systems (machines and virtual machines) do you have at your organization that are being managed by Cobbler? Ballpark is ok, if you can't say "a lot" is fine too :) ANSWER Lots of answers like 200+, 300+, or "a lot", coupled with a lot of folkks with only 10 or 20 systems. Knowing what I know from those not responding to the survey, Cobbler has quite a few installs in the 1000-3000+ range. >From this, I think we can tell that concentrating on SOHO/lab users as well as >Enterprises, like we've been doing, is the continued way to go. We have >users in both camps and the needs of both are equally important. --------- (C) How many cobbler servers do you have? ANSWERS: Evenly mixed between having one server and having 2-3 servers is the norm. A couple sites had 5-6 servers with a single master. One site has 13 servers. Conclusion: replication is a very important use case. One user also mentioned failover, so that is something to research in the future I think -- or at least to document. ------- (D) Generally, what does your organization do? You can omit this if you want. Short answers like "school", "university", "hosting", "government", "research", "finance", etc are fine. ANSWERS: universities -- 4 hosting - 2 finance - 3 legal - 1 system administration / consulting - 1 animation - 1 other - 1 home - 1 There's no real niche area here, which is as I expected. From what I know from IRC and other conversations, this is pretty representative. Universities and hosting are some of the main use cases, but there are also a good number of "grid" type setups. I would imagine some organizations are not going to be able to answer the survey in full, in which case, we still appreciate you all as users very much. This was mainly to get a better idea of what is out there. ---- (E) What do you use for config management if any (puppet, cfengine, bcfg2, home grown, proprietary apps) ANSWERS: Widely varied, but a lot of cfengine and puppet. I know of a bit of bcfg2 usage from IRC, but this is about what I would expect. homegrown migrating to puppet none, generates reports mixture of homegrown and puppet cfengine cfengine migrating to puppet cfengine migrating to mixture of homegrown/puppet puppet (starting to learn) cfengine none cfengine/homegrown investigating hoping to use puppet + spacewalk puppet + ssh for loops puppet cfengine --- (F) What do you use for package management if any (yum directly, Satellite, etc) ANSWERS: Note: based on "cobbler repo list", most users using "yum" are using cobbler with yum. yum yum yum yum yum yumyum yum+mrepo yum rhn+yum directly yum rhn+yum for 3rd party content yum, satellite, pkg* commands yum/rpm CONCLUSION: I think this is about what I expected, though I wasn't quite expecting as much use of regular yum for users that might have a Satellite. In all, nothing new, and no new apps identified here. Ok... (G) What do you use for monitoring if any (nagios, proprietary apps, etc) ANSWERS: munin/unicentre mrtg/hobbit cacti+proprietary nagios nagios migrating to opennms nagios func N/A nagios nagios/helix zenoss nagios (investigating) nagios/munin/cacti nagios nagios nagios/cacti/smokeping nagios/munin CONCLUSION: Lots of interest in nagios, so having at least some snippets or something to help with Nagios setup may be worthwhile. Still, lots of other tools out there to where we could built out similar tips/snippets/etc. If anyone thinks that might be useful, let me know, and we can talk about it. It's also interesting to share what people are using with one another, so that is really my reason for asking that question. Good data. ==== (H) Are you using virtualization? If so, which (VMware, Xen, KVM, other)? Are you using Cobbler for virtualization deployment? ANSWERS: vmware/virtualbox (looking at) xen/yes xen/yes xen/yes xen/yes xen/KVM/yes no vmware/no vmware/xen/yes vmware/xen/yes vmware/yes vmware/no xen/yes vmware/xen/other/yes xen/virtualbox/yes vmware/xen/maybe CONCLUSION: cobbler doesn't do virtualbox yet but it seems like we'd want to look at it. Virtualization uptake is actually larger than what I thought among respondants, so either (A) people pick up Cobbler because they want to do virtualization, or (B) there really is that much interest in Virt. Either way, good deal, and good to know. I didn't uncover interest in any other virt types other than virtualbox, and I think if people are using vmware with koan, you are not alone, so ideas on ways we can make it better (and patches) are greatly welcome. (I) Feel free to share whatever else you want :) ANSWERS: Lots of "thanks", to which I have to say, "you're welcome" and glad to be working with all of you. We had a request for a database backend, some comments about more LDAP integration (that might be site specific), and requests to keep doing things to support PXE-less environments like the livecd and cobbler buildiso. One comment about wanting more puppet integration. Etc.. Etc... ---- Ok, so that sums it up, thanks to everyone who submitted things and hopefully this proves to be an interesting window in how people are using Cobbler and what other tools people on this list are using. Thanks! --Michael _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
