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

the backup and recovery process.

Example implementation

With the background concepts previously covered, you should now have a good basic understanding

of what a comprehensive deployment framework must provide. All that remains is a practical

implementation, providing coverage of these aspects. Given the focus of this document, deployment

of HP ProLiant with RHEL, one approach is to utilize as many solution-based offerings from the

vendors as possible. In that vein, you can start from the service component downward to leverage the

highest level tools available to provide the deployment framework.

Starting from bare metal installation, provision everything needed to provide and maintain the service

in a consistent, repeatable fashion. Given this approach, a good starting point is the Red Hat

Network (RHN) itself, since all systems already contain a subscription and have access. With this

interface, you can ensure that entitled systems can access updates, additional software, and various

other channels of components. However, this only addresses a small portion of a system's lifecycle

rather than the larger needs for a deployment framework to be satisfied.

Deployment framework solution blocks

The next logical step is to use the Red Hat Network Satellite server. This brings an RHN instance

inside your infrastructure, plus adds both monitoring, configuration management, and provisioning

aspects, thus covering many deployment framework requirements. Figure 3 shows a simplified block

diagram of this solution.