Learning Puppet 4

Chapter 30. Controlling Puppet with MCollective

In this chapter, we will configure and enable the orchestration tool that shipped as part of Puppet 4: the Marionette Collective, or MCollective. You’ll learn how to use MCollective to control the Puppet agent on your nodes.

MCollective can:

• Query, start, stop, and restart the Puppet agent.
• Run the Puppet agent with special command-line options.
• Query and make changes to the node using Puppet resources.
• Choose nodes to act on based on the Puppet classes or facts on the node.
• Control concurrency of Puppet runs across a group of nodes.

Tip

If you have used puppet kick in the past, you are likely aware that Puppet Labs has obsoleted and has removed support for it in Puppet 4. The MCollective Puppet agent replaces Puppet kick in both the community and Puppet Enterprise product lines, and provides significantly more features and functionality.

Configuring MCollective

In this section, you will:

• Install ActiveMQ to provide middleware on the Puppet server.
• Install the MCollective server on every node.
• Install the MCollective clients on a system of your choice.
• Enable TLS encryption for all connections.
• Install the Puppet agent plugin for ad hoc control of Puppet.

Enabling the Puppet Labs Repository

Puppet Labs provides Yum and Apt repositories containing packages for the MCollective server, clients, and some officially supported plugins. This community repository supplements the OS vendor repositories for the more popular Linux distributions. ...