Spacewalk - Am I right?

the_Grinch

I am looking at managing about 10 to 12 servers all with CentOS (except one that has Ubuntu). I want to be able to see which ones need updates and the normal server stats (CPU utilization, RAM utilization, hard drive space). I also want to be able to login to a web interface and set them all to update. Am I right in thinking that Spacewalk will allow me to do this? I can live without the server stats, but I want to be able to update all these servers without having to login to each one in order to do so. Thanks in advance!

NightShade03

You are on the right path!

Red Hat -> Satellite
Centos -> Spacewalk

You will be able to deploy/schedule updates, see installed packages, and do basic management through spacewalk. Unfortunately you won't be able to monitor the stats, however you have some great choices in that area as well:

Nagios (Old School)
Zabbix
Cacti
Graphite

All of these will work to pull in centralized stats and reporting for you. Also nice to start small and build up as you scale your environment.

Any other questions just fire away

UnixGuy

I use Nagios, it notifies you whenever there's a new yum update, and it monitors almost everything including our Windows environment, hardware, UPS, ...etc.

the_Grinch

Thanks guys! We use Nagios now and there are a lot of things I like, but there are things I don't like. I'll take a look into the other ones!

phoeneous

NightShade03 wrote: »

Zabbix

Win. You can monitor all sorts of stuff with it, including yum updates.

the_Grinch

Got Spacewalk up and running this afternoon! Thanks again guys!

the_Grinch

So yesterday I was looking at the servers and realized that they were not up to date in regards to the new Bash exploit. I didn't realize that channels and repos had to be setup. Got them setup and synced last night then this morning got all my servers up to date. Thanks again for all the help guys!

JockVSJock

NightShade03 wrote: »

You are on the right path!

Red Hat -> Satellite
Centos -> Spacewalk

You will be able to deploy/schedule updates, see installed packages, and do basic management through spacewalk. Unfortunately you won't be able to monitor the stats, however you have some great choices in that area as well:

Nagios (Old School)
Zabbix
Cacti
Graphite

All of these will work to pull in centralized stats and reporting for you. Also nice to start small and build up as you scale your environment.

Any other questions just fire away

Good info, I'm taking notes here...I want to spin up a few Red Hat Linux Enterprise at work and then start to experiment with some of the software listed above.