The Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers.
Foreman is an Open Source project that helps system administrators manage servers throughout their lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to orchestration and monitoring. Using Puppet or Chef and Foreman's smart proxy architecture, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage change, both on-premise with VMs and bare-metal or in the cloud.
Foreman provides comprehensive, interaction facilities including a web frontend, CLI and RESTful API which enables you to build higher level business logic on top of a solid foundation.
Foreman is 4+ years old, and deployed in many organizations, managing from 10s to 1000s of servers. It is used in distributions such as RDO and RHOS (Red Hat OpenStack distribution) and has an extensive library of plugins.
With Foreman you could:
- Discover, provision and upgrade your entire bare-metal infrastructure
- Create and manage instances across private and public clouds
- Group your hosts and manage them in bulk, regardless of location
- Review historical changes for auditing or troubleshooting
- Extend as needed via a robust plugin architecture
- Automatically build images (on each platform) per system definition to optimize deployment
The following operating systems are known to install successfully from Foreman:
- RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Solaris 8, 10 OpenSUSE, FreeBSD
Foreman can provision on bare metal as well as the following cloud providers:
- Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Libvirt, OpenStack, oVirt and RHEV, Rackspace, VMware
