Introduction

Spacewalk is a systems management solution, potentially interesting for CERN Linux machines. From the Spacewalk Twiki:

Spacewalk is an open source Linux and Solaris systems management solution. It allows you to:
    * Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)
    * Install and update software on your systems
    * Collect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groups
    * Provision (Kickstart) your systems
    * Manage and deploy configuration files to your systems
    * Monitor your systems
    * Provision virtual guests
    * Start/stop/configure virtual guests 

Spacewalk is the upstream project for the source of Red Hat Network Satellite. Spacewalk works with 
RHEL, Fedora, and other RHEL derivative distributions like CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc. 

We want to evaluate the product, and its possible integration into the CERN environment, by the end of Q2 2010.

Evaluation criteria:

We should investigate the following aspects:

General

• Quality of the product
• Documentation
• Strength of the community

Functionality

• User interface
  • Adding machines, grouping them
  • Upgrading machines
  • Installing machines
• Reporting

Manageability, operations

• Administration:
  • Adding SLC versions, channels, packages
• How to provide a reliable service?
  • Stability of software
  • Failover setup
• Scalability
  • How many clients, groups can be supported?
  • How many OS versions, channels?
• FTE cost of running a service

Integration into CERN infrastructure

• How does Spacewalk integrate with:
  • LANdb
  • AIMS
  • Linuxsoft
  • ELFms (?)
• Can Spacewalk replace any of the above?
• What would be the cost of such an integration?

Links

• http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/ Spacewalk homepage @ Redhat
• https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/ Spacewalk Twiki @ Fedora