The Back Pack Zac Attack (Aka, Two Cents)

What is Metaleuca?

Metaleuca is a bare-metal provision management system that interacts with open-source software Cobbler via EC2-like CLI.

Using Metaleuca, users can communicate with Cobbler to self-provision a group of bare-metal machines to boot up with new, fresh OS images. The main appeal of Metaleuca is that it allows users to manage the bare-metal machines like EC2's virtual instances via the command-lines that feel much like ec2-tools, or euca2ools.

HAProxy is an open source load balancer/reverse proxy that can provide high availability for your network services. While generally used for web services, it can also be used to provide more reliability for services such as SMTP and terminal services. In addition we can combine it with the Keepalived package to allow high availability/failover for the HAProxy server itself. HAProxy plus Keepalived can provide a good solution for high availability at a very low cost in comparison to proprietary hardware based load balancers.

In a previous post I discussed installing the open source VMware tools for Red Hat Enterprise/Scientific/CentOS Linux 6 from a yum package repository provided by VMware. This is in contrast to using the version distributed directly with VMware ESX/ESXi, which with the Linux platform was not provided in an RPM package format. With the upgrade to ESXi 5 the update process for the tools installed from the repository is not very seamless because of some update issues in addition to package changes.