1. What is Foreman?
Foreman is an open source project that helps system administrators manage servers throughout their lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to orchestration and monitoring. Using Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible and Foreman’s smart proxy architecture, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage change, both on-premise with VMs and bare-metal or in the cloud.
Foreman provide comprehensive, interaction facilities including a web frontend, CLI and RESTful API which enables you to build higher level business logic on top of a solid foundation.
The Foreman interface is very easy to use and user friendly.
As your organization grows, so does your workload — and the IT resources required to manage it. There is no “one-size-fits-all” system management solution, but a centralized, open source tool such as Foreman can help you manage your company’s IT assets by provisioning, maintaining, and updating hosts throughout the complete lifecycle.
Foreman becomes even more powerful when integrated with other open source projects and plugins, and I will discuss these in more detail below. To get started, however, let’s consider key functions of an effective system management tool.
Host provisioning is for deploying instances or virtual machines on bare-metal, on-premises, or a cloud provider’s data center.
Content management refers to publishing, promoting, and managing various versions of repositories and packages in the CDN and systems across the life cycle (i.e., development, testing, QA, and production).
Patch/errata management includes bug fixes and advisory or enhancement packages. An effective systems management tool should identify applicable errata regularly and patch registered systems promptly.
Subscription or license management enables the purchase, renewal, and extension of subscriptions through a systems management portal. This information should be updated frequently in the user account for each system.
Health monitoring and reporting enables real-time system checkups. This should include updates, errata, compliance, workload, and system performance metrics for registered hosts and running services.
Remote execution is for running arbitrary commands on hosts or groups of hosts to perform similar activities remotely. These commands can be customized; for example, to provision templates or partition tables.
Identity and policy lets you create different users and roles and manage various permission policies. This function should also support Kerberos and LDAP integration and authentication.
Alerts and notification audits administrator and user activities. This tool should instantly detect what changes are made in each node, when they are made, and where potential risk may exist.
Automation applies to repetitive tasks. A top systems management tool should help identify and automate these processes.
2. How to install Foreman?
Foreman can be installed on a Virtual Machine or on your bare metal.
For the initial setup, you must first open four mandatory ports 69 for TFTP, 80 for Http, 443 for Https UI access, 8140 for Puppet master and enable the Puppet, EPEL, and Foreman repositories. The following installation steps were performed on CentOS 7; however, other platforms that support Foreman installation include Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, etc.
Step 1: Download Puppet, EPEL, and Foreman RPMs.
# yum -y install https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
# yum -y install http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
# yum -y install https://yum.theforeman
Step 2: Install and execute the Foreman installer RPM.
# yum -y install foreman-installer
# foreman-installer –help
# foreman-installer
Step 3: After installation, the installer with give you Foreman URL details, a default login user admin, and an auto-generated random password. Launch the Foreman https: URL on your browser and log in.
Successful installation of the Foreman tool using installer.
Login screen to Foreman GUI. Sign in here after installation to change your password.
Default password for Admin user is changeme.
For further information, you can refer to foreman documentation which includes information about foreman plugins and how to install them.
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