Deployment Framework Best Practices for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant

10
Network infrastructure services
Starting with the foundational element, the network infrastructure services, you must attend to these
very basic services. Even if the network infrastructure services are already provided and no
additional work on your part is required, you should understand them as they offer great impact to the
overall deployment strategy. Comprehensive documentation exists to guide you through installation,
setup, and configuration of each of these services, so only a brief mention is made of the required
functionaly and integration aspects needed for each of these services.
The network infrastructure can be broken up into a handful of core services as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Deployment framework solution – network infrastructure services
The following elaborates on each service, noting particular aspects to address for the deployment
framework. Any best practices are noted as some services may also be augmented by inclusion of
other tools and by the integration with these services peers.
Network Time Protocol (NTP) - Using either a directed or broadcast based implementation for
NTP yields a coherent source of time across all configured systems. Given some care, you can esasily
scale this service.
BEST PRACTICE: You can easily couple NTP into the DHCP service as you can provide the
parameter for a source along with other information to systems requesting an IP address.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) - When systems are connected to the network,
systems can either obtain an IP address dynamically or be configured statically. With DHCP, newly
connected systems can receive connectivity and service configuration information.
BEST PRACTICE: You can easily configure DHCP to provide IP reservations, and thus give the
appearance of static IP addresses. This recommended approach still retains the benefits of minimal
client side configuration.