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

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With both Cobbler and kickstart in place, the RHEL installer, anaconda, can now perform the install
completely without intervention. The anaconda toolset thus provides a scripted installation paradigm,
to allow hardware abstraction, yet delivering a correct by construction result.
Based upon the described best practices so far, it is reasonable to provision a service platform, in an
automated fashion that has a known set of firmware versions, the necessary device drivers integrated,
and an operating system profile that can be completed pre-determined.
Configuration management
The configuration management portion is provided by the RHN Satellite server, based upon the
spacewalk toolset, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Deployment framework – configuration management
The key functionality provided by this block is to manage the post-install life cycle of the target
systems. By providing operating system updates directly from Red Hat, you can maintain your
systems easily with regard to security updates, bug fixes, and other enhancement requests. These
offerings are visible within the repository and are typically preconfigured as channels, which the
target systems subscribe to. A simple bootstrap process allows the system to access the content that
the respective subscription or entitilement allows.