Automated deployment of systems
Automated deployment of systems
The goal of this blog is to show some of the capabilities that make NetBox a terrific tool and will be using NetBox as your network Source of Truth for automation!
I've recently been investigating doing some automated zero touch deployment stuff in my lab.
I have PXE boot in my lab but I feel like I'm under utilizing it. I was thinking about exploring using ansible with netbox as right now I only use netbox as a glorified wiki.
I'm just curious if anyone here has zero touch deployment and has any interesting takes on what it is good for and what it isn't good for (I would really like to hear about some edge cases).
Thanks!
Base os install ad a template in your hypervisor. Ansible playbook with a task to spin up the VM, another task to setup network and required packages. Then other playbooks for the software/services setup.
At work, we use Racetrack, if that counts. It works quite well.
I use Ansible for all my deployments and just got a PXE boot set up with a preseed file to automate the install process and get the host ready to run playbooks.
I've been really pleased with this strategy overall. I think that Ansible works really well for programmatically generating config files which in turn makes moving applications between servers effortless. I control docker volume mounts with ansible variables and encrypt secrets with ansible vault so I can do everything all in one place.
Troubleshooting issues is a lot easier and recovering from a backup is faster and a requires less effort since I can just pull down the Ansible config from git and redeploy.
I use NixOS but I don't bother with automatic deployment or even automatic formatting. I don't feel it's necessary in a homelab setting as hardware failure rarely happens at such small scale and the manual steps left aren't that significant.
Setup a good kickstart script (even if it's just enough for Ansible to Configure it the rest of the way). It's awesome when messing with a system to be able to reboot select the reinstall PXE boot option and get a fresh install to tinker on.
On a similar note, I want to try boot2container as my PXE target next personally