Interview
“The repository management, through the use of orcharhino, has clearly improved.”
– Stefan Bock, T-engineer, Federal Employment Agency IT system house
Tobias Wagner (TW): What systems do you have in use?
Stefan Bock: Originally, we only used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Now, however, systems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux have been added.
TW: Why were you looking for an automation solution?
Stefan Bock: We have been using Foreman so far. Now a second operating system was added, which we had to migrate. So we needed a unified solution so we didn’t have to synchronize all the software across two different systems. The problem here is the numerous different systems we have to support. This starts with SLES 12 and SLES 15 and also RHEL 7 and 8. The high number of repositories with sometimes several version strings at the same time generates a lot of staging effort. We were looking for automation for this.
TW: How and why did you become aware of orcharhino?
Stefan Bock: We were already using Puppet and Foreman. On this basis, we started an evaluation with Katello and came across orcharhino. Since we need to synchronize SUSE repositories, orcharhino was the product of choice. One of the decisive points was that the included SCC Manager was written by ATIX itself. Another important aspect is that ATIX provides support for this. This is particularly important in the government environment.
We have been using the open source project Foreman and Puppet for five years now. Katello we had also long in the back of the head, only this could not support SUSE for a very long time. Now ATIX is very active in the open source community, so there is now a solution for this. For our requirements, orcharhino, for which support is available, was the right product.
TW: What is orcharhino currently used for?
Stefan Bock: So far, we have only used it to manage repositories.
TW: What has changed since you started using orcharhino?
Stefan Bock: I have to say up front that we are not yet productive – but this is not due to orcharhino, but currently to internal processes. But for us, the big advantage is that with orcharhino we can cover several operating systems with one tool and also simplify things like staging etc. The management of repositories has clearly improved through the use of orcharhino. When rolling out a major release, we used to take a script-controlled approach. In other words, we had to replace the entire repositories on all managed systems. However, we always had systems that fell out of line. Now we can control the whole thing much better through automation using Activation Keys, Content Views, and Lifecycle Environments.
TW: How many servers are you currently managing with orcharhino on your test system?
Stefan Bock: The use of orcharhino is firmly planned on approx. 5000 SLES systems with different versions of SLES 12 and also SLES 15. In the Red Hat area, we are then at approx. 100 systems with current RHEL 7.9 and 8.3. The servers of major release 8 will then be updated to RHEL 8.5 with orcharhino. We can already say that these will all be connected in the productive environment.
TW: Are these physical servers or virtual servers?
Stefan Bock: There are physical servers, but we currently assume that at least 2/3 of them will be virtual servers.
TW: What are you currently planning or what other feature would you like to see at orcharhino?
Stefan Bock: Basically, we are very satisfied at the moment. We are simultaneously in the process of building our own cloud solution. We therefore try to use the Ansible modules for orcharhino. There are still a few small challenges here and there, but the connection for software management works very well. If you ask what else we would like to see in addition, these are only very specific things. One thing would be, for example, that there would be some sort of environment function like there is for Puppet, also available for Ansible. But as I said, this is already very special.
TW: Thank you very much for your time and the pleasant conversation!
