What are the biggest configuration management challenges?
Summary: today I had an operations managmenet guy ask me what the biggest challenges of configuration management are. I gave my usual ‘it depends’ qualifier, but soon focused on client health management and management points. I was right – it does depend. On a small or medium scale, management points will be simple (there will be just one per site, and they’ll be on the site server). And on a small scale either client health management doesn’t matter or you go and look at the client to see what state it’s in. But on larger scales those issues can become tricky. I would like to edit my answer: configuration management is also a ‘many moving parts’ problem. Operations management has the benefit of usually being done for datacenter servers that are non-mobile, generally at the end of fast links, require limited services (what I call ‘eventing’), and are almost always ‘up’. They’re also expensive, so the scale is smaller. Configuration management doesn’t generally have those advantages. So
