Open source systems management tools slideshow: Spacewalk profile

 

Open source systems management profile: Spacewalk

Spacewalk

Spacewalk is an open source Linux systems management tool and the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived. Spacewalk provides provisioning and monitoring capabilities as well as software content management.

James Hogarth, a data center admin in the U.K., uses Spacewalk to manage 100 hosts in a CentOS-based environment for an entertainment website built on the Grails distribution. Hogarth said his company's entire environment is focused on open source software -- even migrating server virtualization from VMware to the Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or KVM) hypervisor -- and that open source focus was a major factor in the decision to use open source systems management tools.

Hogarth said he's run into some gotchas and issues that needed a workaround, but overall Spacewalk has lightened his support workload. Most of the development is done by Red Hat personnel, and the developers are often available to answer questions and troubleshoot issues. "People are very responsive [on the support forum], and it's relatively rare that you don't get a response," Hogarth said. "Over the last two years, the product has really matured."

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This was first published in September 2010

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