Virtualization helps reduce the complexity and expense of managing physical hardware, but increases the need for configuration management. When virtualization is implemented, an entirely new layer of “moving parts” are added to the mix, dramatically increasing the complexity of managing business applications and the infrastructure that they rely upon.
We moved from an outsourced managed hosting solution to an inhouse managed hosting web platform. We use puppet to manage our web platform, which are mainly Virtual machines. All our puppet scripts are managed using git and divided up into 3 main branches, (Testing, Acceptation & Production). We use puppet to setup and deploy our web application servers on the servers, this reduced a lot of setup time for each deployment during our platform migration, and new rollouts.
Tom Mulder, Reed Business
Puppet supports virtualization out of the box, and can treat virtual systems just like physical ones. Puppet’s model-driven framework can be used in such environments to provide unprecedented flexibility, power, and scalability, enabling IT staff to prescriptively build an automated infrastructure. The benefits of automated infrastructure go beyond policy-enforced consistency and auditing. In conjunction with virtualization, the ability to reliably create new systems running consistent services allows creation of auto-scaling applications as well as test systems identical to production environments. Using Puppet, especially in dynamic virtualized environments, reduces error counts and downtime, saving countless hours while providing significantly higher service quality.