Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines.
Uyuni is a fork of Spacewalk that leverages Salt, Cobbler and containers to modernize it. Uyuni is the upstream for SUSE Manager (the main difference is support: with SUSE Manager you get it from SUSE; with Uyuni you get it from the community) and our development and feature discussion is done in the open.
Last week we released Uyuni 2020.03, with much improved Debian support, coming from the community: we have got client tools (both the Salt stack and the traditional stack) for Debian 9 and 10, and bootstrapping support!
In addition to that, Uyuni 2020.03 brings many other new features:
- Package pre-downloading for Debian and Ubuntu
- Automatic generation of bootstrap repositories
- Provisioning API for Salt clients (previously only for traditional clients), which allows to provision and re-provision Salt minions
- Recurring actions scheduling, e. g. schedule highstate to happen every so often, repeatedly
- Content Lifecycle Management filters for RHEL 8 appstreams so that you can convert modular repositories to plain repositories by applying a combination of filters. It will also work on RHEL derivatives, of course: CentOS, Oracle Linux and SLES Expanded Support.
- Yomi: Yet One More Installer is a Salt-based installer for SUSE and openSUSE operating systems. More architectures (e. g. ARM) and Linux distributions will follow soon!
- Hub XML-RPC API: the first component of our multi-Server architecture, to support hundreds of thousands of clients
- SUSE Container as a Platform 4 (SUSE’s Kubernetes distribution) cluster awareness. Nodes in a SUSE CaaSP 4 cluster will by default not install updates, patches, run commands, etc from Uyuni Server on the normal schedule but default to doing that using skuba, CaaSP’s tool in charge of updates and reboots. Further enhancements are coming to this feature soon.
While this version of Uyuni provides a much better experience for Debian sysadmins, we still have a lot of room for improvement:
- Run Uyuni Server and Proxy on Debian (currently only supported on openSUSE Leap, sponsored by SUSE)
- Autoinstallation with preseed (currently only AutoYaST and Kickstart are supported)
- CVE auditing and “errata” (patch) concept. Uyuni currently treats all .deb packages equally as normal updates.
- Use Salt from Debian (currently using the openSUSE version for Debian 9 and Debian 10, because it’s more recent and it includes a lot of patches and backports from upstream)
- Building Debian-based images (e. g. using Kiwi)
- Package and system locking (the kind of locking used on CaaSP 4 systems)
- And probably more I cannot even remember at this point
Do you want to help us with development, or just with feedback? Join our community on IRC, Gitter or the mailing lists. And check our user documentation, developer documentation and presentations.
We are also participating in Google Summer of Code 2020. Hurry up and submit a proposal to provide Uyuni for Debian, and/or enhance Debian support!