Review: Chef cooks up configuration management
Among the various configuration management frameworks available today, Opscode's Chef is a relative newcomer. But as the double-digit version number would suggest, Chef has been making strides toward...
View ArticlePuppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt
The proliferation of virtualization coupled with the increasing power of industry-standard servers and the availability of cloud computing has led to a significant uptick in the number of servers that...
View ArticleAnsible orchestration is a veteran Unix admin's dream
Many server automation and orchestration solutions, like Puppet and Chef, rely on a mixture of solution-specific coding, Web UIs, and command-line tools to make the magic happen. Ansible is different....
View ArticleSalt keeps server automation simple
Like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, Salt is an open source server management and automation solution with commercial, officially supported options. Based on command-line-driven server and client services...
View ArticleHow-to: Get started with Docker
Docker is an open source framework that provides a lighter-weight type of virtualization, using Linux containers rather than virtual machines. Built on traditional Linux distributions such as Red Hat...
View ArticleHow to choose the right Linux distro for you
Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're...
View Article7 free tools every network needs
In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your...
View ArticleHow-to: Get started with MariaDB
MariaDB is a fork of the wildly popular open source database MySQL. Although MariaDB is very similar to MySQL, it is not necessarily the same. One of the primary goals behind the MariaDB project is to...
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7 great open source monitoring tools
7 killer open source monitoring toolsNetwork and system monitoring is a broad category. There are solutions that monitor for the proper operation of servers, network gear, and applications, and there...
View ArticleSDN in action: Hands on with Cumulus Linux
The stage is set for SDN (software-defined networking) to change the way we push data through our infrastructures, with the promises of more agile network provisioning and management, as well as more...
View ArticleHow-to: Get started with Nginx
Although the most popular Web server in the world is still Apache, Nginx is cutting into that market share in a very significant way. Both versatile and extremely fast, Nginx generally performs faster...
View ArticleReview: Mirantis takes the sting out of OpenStack deployments
Those who know OpenStack know it’s an exceptionally powerful cloud infrastructure platform. They also know it’s far from simple to build and deploy. A large number of moving parts make up a production...
View ArticleFirst look: VMware vSphere 6 keeps its edge
In the not so distant past, VMware held a long and commanding lead in the server virtualization space, offering core features that were simply unmatched by the competition. In the past few years,...
View ArticleNAS shoot-out: QNAP vs. Synology
The past few years have seen a meteoric rise in the breadth and scope of small-business NAS, and while the top names in this space may have brought the core disciplines of NAS and even SAN to...
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Review: Cisco ACI shakes up SDN
The concept of object health is present throughout ACI. When problems are detected, an object’s health score drops from 100, with lower scores indicating greater severity. This is hierarchical, so...
View ArticlePuppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt
The proliferation of virtualization coupled with the increasing power of industry-standard servers and the availability of cloud computing has led to a significant uptick in the number of servers that...
View ArticleAnsible orchestration is a veteran Unix admin's dream
Many server automation and orchestration solutions, like Puppet and Chef, rely on a mixture of solution-specific coding, Web UIs, and command-line tools to make the magic happen. Ansible is different....
View ArticleSalt keeps server automation simple
Like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, Salt is an open source server management and automation solution with commercial, officially supported options. Based on command-line-driven server and client services...
View ArticleHow-to: Get started with Docker
Docker is an open source framework that provides a lighter-weight type of virtualization, using Linux containers rather than virtual machines. Built on traditional Linux distributions such as Red Hat...
View ArticleHow to choose the right Linux distro for you
Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're...
View Article