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

Introduction

Overview

This document presents a technical survey of Linux deployment issue, best practices and tools. It

includes recommendations for assessing the various requirements of a complete deployment

framework, both from a strategic and tactical perspective. Through examination of background

concepts and best practices, an example implementation of integrating these diverse offerings into a

cohesive deployment framework is presented.

The primary focus of this document is on the HP ProLiant platform and the deployment of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux. As possible, these boundary conditions are relaxed to include more of the Linux on

ProLiant general ecosystem.

Intended audience

The primary audience for this document is junior or intermediate system administrators, although some

general sections are applicable to a wider audience. Readers should be familiar with general

computing paradigms and comfortable with a focus on Linux system administration and IT practices.

Background

Mapping tendencies

For customers that are new to Linux deployment on industry standard systems, like the HP ProLiant

platform, it is often quite a daunting task to have both a strategic and tactical implementation.

Several main factors contribute to the success of a deployment framework, including the culture of the

support staff and the totality of solution space being targeted. For a given scale of the solution, the

remaining consideration is how expedient, repeatable, and controlled the deployment framework

must be over the target lifetime of the business services being managed.

Figure 1 shows that the problem space can be divided into at least two general continuums: the

operating platform mix and the integration culture of the support staff.