Evgeni Golov

With the Foreman Project dropping support for EL7 in Foreman 3.3 (~Summer 2022), it's finally time to tackle that migration to EL8 you have been putting off for a while now. In this session we will present various ways how you can migrate your installation from EL7 to EL8, with the main focus on the in-place upgrade using LEAPP/ELevate.

The Foreman Project is planning to drop support for EL7-based deployments in Foreman 3.3, mostly due to the fact that EL7 is considered "feature complete" and there are no further updates (besides security fixes) planned for it. Contrary to Debian or Fedora, EL-based distributions aren't designed to be upgraded in-place without special tooling. This tooling exists in form of the LEAPP project for RHEL and the ELevate fork by AlmaLinux for AlmaLinux, CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux. We have developed a plugin for LEAPP that helps with the Foreman-specific parts of the migration, which we would like to present to you. As usual, there were a few challenges during the development, which will hopefully entertain you and maybe even help if you need to write own LEAPP plugins. And last but not least, we will also discuss other approaches you can take for the migration, if you do not want to upgrade in-place.

The "pet vs cattle" thing is getting pretty long in the tooth, but the one thing one keeps hearing is that the management layer somehow always remains a pet.

While there is certainly some truth to that - you don't want to rebuild your management plane every day - wouldn't it be cool if you could?

The "pet vs cattle" thing is getting pretty long in the tooth, but the one thing one keeps hearing is that the management layer somehow always remains a pet. While there is certainly some truth to that - you don't want to rebuild your management plane every day - wouldn't it be cool if you could? In this talk we will show how to fully automate the deployment and configuration of Foreman using Ansible, which allows for reproducible setups, redeployments and testing environments that actually match production. The presented solution should not (and can not) replace working backups, but it might still save you when the restore isn't going as expected or someone asks to start "fresh" while keeping all the important details the same as before. We will show how to deploy Foreman from scratch in an reproducible way, reusing the same bits the project uses itself. This will also include plugins like Katello and Ansible for best possible client management later. We'll continue with integrating Foreman with compute resources and managing content in Katello, which will result in trivial deployments of further cattle systems from Foreman, which then can be managed via Ansible. The result is a set of playbooks that can be stored in a git repository and deployed at will.

Foreman ist ein Tool zur Verwaltung von physikalischen und virtuellen Servern. Doch wie verwaltet man Foreman selber? In diesem Vortrag werden die Foreman Ansible Modules vorgestellt, mit denen man Foreman konfigurieren und steuern kann. Es werden vorhandene Module an einigen Beispielen vorgeführt sowie die Möglichkeiten der Entwicklung neuer Module erklärt.