Building on my “looking at” list, I’ve had a quick foray into Landscape – Canonicals system management tool – and how it fares and what it can actually *do*.
What is landscape?
As per the section here on Canonicals website (link here) Landscape is “the enterprise systems management solution from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Compatible with all common Linux administration tools, it gives you everything you need to manage Ubuntu at scale.”
In other words, Landscape is to Ubuntu what Red Hat Satellite / Spacewalk is to Red Hat. This service can be used to administer, update and to an extent monitor, all the ubuntu servers in your estate.
How does it work?
Landscape runs locally or in the cloud and has machines register themselves into it so that they can be administered, etc. It looks something like this:
In my example I am using the 30-day trial of Landscape and as such using Ubuntu’s SaaS offering (a good idea in my opinion, to allow users to get “up and running” in testing the software very quickly).
The first thing I had to do was spin up some Ubuntu installations. In the instructions it mentions: “Ubuntu 8.10 (“intrepid”) and newer already contain the Landscape client in the official repositories.” so one assumes that means any builds of 8.10 onwards are compatible with Landscape.
Once my installation was up and running, i had to run the below commands:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install landscape-client sudo landscape-config --computer-title "My Web Server" --account-name private1998
This then loads up a script asking a series of questions as below:
ubuntu@ip-10-227-126-182:~$ sudo landscape-config --computer-title "My Web Server" --account-name private1998 The Landscape client must be started on boot to operate correctly. Start Landscape client on boot? (Y/n): This script will interactively set up the Landscape client. It will ask you a few questions about this computer and your Landscape account, and will submit that information to the Landscape server. After this computer is registered it will need to be approved by an account administrator on the pending computers page. Please see https://landscape.canonical.com for more information. A registration key may be associated with your Landscape account to prevent unauthorized registration attempts. This is not your personal login password. It is optional, and unless explicitly set on the server, it may be skipped here. If you don't remember the registration key you can find it at https://landscape.canonical.com/account/private1998 Account registration key: The Landscape client communicates with the server over HTTP and HTTPS. If your network requires you to use a proxy to access HTTP and/or HTTPS web sites, please provide the address of these proxies now. If you don't use a proxy, leave these fields empty. HTTP proxy URL: HTTPS proxy URL: Landscape has a feature which enables administrators to run arbitrary scripts on machines under their control. By default this feature is disabled in the client, disallowing any arbitrary script execution. If enabled, the set of users that scripts may run as is also configurable. Enable script execution? [y/N]y By default, scripts are restricted to the 'landscape' and 'nobody' users. Please enter a comma-delimited list of users that scripts will be restricted to. To allow scripts to be run by any user, enter "ALL". Script users: ALL You may provide tags for this computer e.g. server,precise. Tags: server,aws * Stopping landscape-client daemon [fail] * Starting the landscape-client daemon [ OK ] Request a new registration for this computer now? (Y/n): Please wait... System successfully registered.
Note there are options here for security (Account registration key) and script execution which is a nice idea (sort of NRPE-esque!).
Once the script was ran, we can log-in to our Landscape server and a little button appears asking me to accept the new server and add it to my landscape. Once i hit accept, we can see our new Ubuntu 13.04 EC2 instance as below:
We can click on “Monitoring” to get a basic view into the performance of the ubuntu machine; CPU , Disk, Memory and Network throughput as below:
And we can click onto “Info” to get a Asset management type view into the server:
We can also view users here, get a report onto the health of the estate (make sure servers have called home, etc) and see a great view into the packages on this box – what needs updating, what packages have vulnerabilities, etc.
Packages view:
Closing thoughts
This is a nice little tool that can be used to manage and administer ubuntu servers en-masse. However, looking at the official pricing for this solution (list pricing at least) here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/management/how-to-get-landscape (scroll down a little)
We can see that for a standard enterprise deployment (Server Management: Standard) the pricing comes in at a hefty $700 per server per year.If you are running 400 servers, thats the best part of $300,000 – just for management, just for your Ubuntu systems.
That is seriously expensive.
Desktop pricing comes in at $105 per desktop, so still $42,000 for 400 desktops running Ubuntu (which i doubt many people have, he says with a smirk).
All in all, I think its a nice tool and “cool”, but would i recommend to people that they buy this at the costs above? Not really. I think you can use Puppet or Chef to do the deployment en-masse aspect of this (which is cross platform/OS, too) and the rest of it such as monitoring, well – i dont need to tell you where to go for that.. 🙂 Nice try Canonical – that kind of money for a package manager is too rich for my blood as a punter.
