If you’re a system administrator, you’ve probably already heard of Cfengine, a cross-platform datacenter automation framework used by more than 5,000 companies on millions of machines worldwide. With Cfengine, the sysadmin describes the desired system state and Cfengine takes care of the rest: it will install packages, maintain configuration files, keep permissions and ensure the right processes are running according to your policy.

The Cfengine team has been investigating how Cfengine may be used on both the physical and virtual sides of an OpenNebula-based cloud. More specifically, we have been looking into how Cfengine can be used to install and configure the physical infrastructure in an OpenNebula cloud, followed by the launch and configuration of generic virtual machine images that will run on top of that OpenNebula infrastructure.

This week, at the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in San Jose, we will give a brief overview of the possibilities of a Cfengine-managed OpenNebula setup. If you can’t make it to our talk, during the Cfengine BoF (Tuesday, November 9th, 7pm-8pm), you can check out the slides from our presentation here.

Cfengine team