Product: System Imager - Automate Deployment and Installs

From their website: SystemImager is software that makes the installation of Linux to masses of similar machines relatively easy. It makes software distribution, configuration, and operating system updates easy, and can also be used for content distribution. SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even update from one Linux release version to another! It can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production enviroment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image with a simple update command! Some typical environments include: Internet server farms, database server farms, high performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate desktop environments.

Related Articles

Cluster Admin's article Installing and updating your nodes is an excellent introduction to SystemImager. He says it's fast, scalable, simple, makes it easy to install on running nodes, allows management of different OS images and remote installation on any given group of nodes.

Automate Linux installation and recovery with SystemImager by Paul Virijevich

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Product: SmartFrog a Distributed Configuration and Deployment Framework

From Wikipedia: SmartFrog is an open-source software framework, written in Java, that manages the configuration, deployment and coordination of a software system broken into components. These components may be distributed across several network hosts. The configuration of components is described using a domain-specific language, whose syntax resembles that of Java. It is a prototype-based object-oriented language, and may thus be compared to Self. The framework is used internally in a variety of HP products. Also, it is being used by HP Labs partners like CERN.

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Distributed Testing with SmartFrog

Puppet the Automated Administration System

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Scaling Operations Saves Money and Scales Faster

Jesse Robbins at O'Reily Radar has a nice post on how spending a little up front time on figuring out how to scale your operations process saves money on ops people and allows you to save time adding and upgrading servers. Adding, monitoring, and upgrading servers can get so incredibly screwed up that a herd of squirrels has to work overtime just to put out a release. Or it can be one button simple from your automated build system out to your servers. This is one area where "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" is a dumb idea and Jesse does a good job capturing the advantages of doing it right.

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