Quick setup of multiple servers. How?

Question

Puppet

We rent physical servers from the host. Many servers must be configured identically.
Recommend what should be done for this: use solutions like puppet/chef or solutions from acronis?
Maybe a simple rsync between the directories of the configured server and the finished server?
Thank you.

Answer 1

I would raise the virtualization to Xen, and then just throw the image of the virtual machine where necessary. Installing Xen easily fits into a 5 line bash script.

Answer 2

If you have a budget, it is better to choose Acronis.

Answer 3

By the way, if the hoster gives something like a heztner's resque shell, then you can put a bzip-compressed disk image somewhere (before installation, it's better to fill everything with zeros so that it stings better), then mount via nfs or sshfs, after which This image is easy to fill in on the hard drive. It will turn out byte by byte, cheap and cheerful.
Well, or just roll up the file in tar.gz, deploy it on the server and make grub-intall from chroot, if we are transferring linux.

Answer 4

Did you think about network loading, by the way?
Here's another option: we put a bare system, unpack the initrd, upload a script there that formats the partition, downloads the image and uploads it there, then mounts it as the root and continues loading, as if nothing had happened. We collect the initrd back, put it in /boot next to the kernel, edit the coarse settings. After each reboot, we get a brand new system in the most current version.

Answer 5

DRBD

Answer 6

Look towards Bacula

Answer 7

our admin assembled the package(s) from the required software,
then deployed this package(s) on each of the 40 servers