In our ongoing Puppet series, we just completed installing PuppetDB and Hiera. There’s one other installable that’s a bit more complicated than those two.

MCollective

Since writing this article, the module puppetlabs/mcollective has been updated. In particular, the “middleware => true” parameter is not valid in the base class. I have not had time to revisit this and update the solution. If you have, please drop me a line in the comments!

The last component we’re going to install today is MCollective. While developed by Puppet Labs, MCollective isn’t directly related to Puppet, as PuppetDB and Hiera are. It’s not a Configuration Management tool, it’s an Orchestration API. It does integrate quite well with Puppet and Facter, among other sources. Some things you can do with MCollective might be to query how many systems have 32GB of RAM, how many systems are running a version of OpenSSL vulnerable to Heartbleed, or to restart Apache on all servers in the Development environment. This installation is trickier than either PuppetDB or Hiera.
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