Puppet agent mass deployment

Question

Is there a built-in way to mass deploy the Puppet agent on hundreds of nodes, in an unattended, automated way? (providing user/pass/cert.)

Answer 1

There is no built in way to do so. But, you can always use kickstart/pre-seed to deploy puppet agent as part of os provisioning and hand it to puppet to manage your hosts.

Or as an alternate you can write custom shell script to deploy puppet agent's on hundreds on machines, I personally use this method to manage puppet. For reference here is the script.

Also, you may be interested in project razor which automatically deploys puppet as part of bare-metal provisioning and hands it to puppet for configuration management.

Answer 2

Basically the only thing you need to do is to install the Puppet Agent on those machines. I assume that you don't install software packages manually for hundreds of nodes, right?

Once you installed the Agent, it will automatically find the Puppet Master (if puppet.yourdomain.com points to that host), sends certificate requests to the Master where you need to sign them. You can also use the autosign feature of Puppet.

Furthermore, Puppet Enterprise and The Foreman are bases on Puppet and they come along with additional provisioning features.

Answer 3

I suggest that you use the parallel SSH. There are plenty of flavours, I prefer clush, see https://github.com/cea-hpc/clustershell/wiki/clush

You need to create your /etc/clustershell/groups file with groups, e.g.:

all: node[1-2000]

Then you can install the puppet on all the nodes easily with something like this:

clush -bw @all yum -y install puppet