RE: Quick cfengine poll...

[Andrews, Martin]

I have about 100 servers using cfengine located in 4 US offices and 2 UK
offices. I also run cfengine on our PCs (minimal configuration so far) at
login time (I don't have a good count, but I think we have less PCs than
servers). Each office has its own cfd server to cut down on WAN traffic. I
have not noticed any performance problems and so have not really
investigated it.

Martin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Mayhew [mailto:amayhew@logictier.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 3:30 PM
> To: help-cfengine@gnu.org
> Subject: Quick cfengine poll...
> 
> 
> Internal to the company that I work for we have been going over a
> process of evaluation the direction our system management is going to
> take.  Currently we use cfengine, but there seems to be a large push,
> primarily from our Software Engineering group to develop something
> from scratch ourselves.  Seems to me to be a big wheel reinventing
> project and will take a lot longer than they anticipate. Their major
> contention is that cfengine is not a valid enterprise management
> system and that it was never designed as such.  Or in their words:
> 
>      Overall general design of Cfengine followed an evolutionary
>       process that did not initially target large-scale enterprise
>       architectures. Any eventual support for large-scale enterprise
>       functionality was added over time without a fundamental redesign
>       of Cfengine.  In order to effectively guarantee use in a
>       distributed enterprise environment, it may very well be 
> necessary
>       to make deep fundamental design and implementation changes to
>       Cfengine to address the technical and business requirements for
>       Provisioning 2.0.
> 
> They also seem to have problems with cfengine's ability (or in their
> view lack of ability) to scale to very large scale systems.  Could any
> of you out there give me some numbers in terms of systems which you
> are managing with cfengine.  Something like a cfengine client to cfd
> server ratio would be greate.  Anyone with systems spread over a wide
> area would also be a plus since in our situation we have host systems
> in various places around the US and Europe.
> 
> I really believe that thier arguments are invalid and any support that
> I can get would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks-
> Andrew Mayhew
> 
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