Survey of Configuration Management Tools
A while back, I tried to list the various open source configuration management tools. I just found an interesting report written by student of the Catholic University of Leuven. In this report Thomas Delaet and Wouter Joosen are reviewing BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli, Opsware, Microsoft SMS and open source projects like Bcfg2, cfengine, LCFG and puppet.
The authors are proposing an interesting taxonomy to evaluate the tools:
1. Abstraction Level: The language used by a configuration management solution can be classified at different levels of abstraction, ranging from high-level end-to-end requirements, to low-level bit-configurations.
2. Specification Language: In this section, we discuss four specification language criteria dealing with usability, domain coverage of a configuration management solution, the grouping mechanism and specifications at multiple abstraction levels.
3. Consistency: In this section, we discuss three criteria that ensure consistency in a computer infrastructure: modeling dependencies, conflict management and workflow management.
4. Distributed Management: Distributed management deals with federated management and distributes translation of configuration specifications.
The conclusion summarize the capabilities of the tools in a nice table.
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