The growth in Linux virtualization and the move to distributed cloud computing environments in the last few years have made the system administrator’s job both more streamlined and more complex. Within virtual infrastructures and the tools in place, it is easier than ever before to manage, provision, and expand Linux virtual machines, and yet this work involves new tools and processes that sometimes offer the sysadmin a dizzying array from which to choose. This book attempts to move through the most popular and recommended tool options for a fairly wide variety of tasks within the context of Enterprise Linux at scale. It does this fairly well and should be of interest and use to a variety of sysadmins, DevOps, and to a lesser extent developers of virtualized and cloud-based application environments.

The book, organized into ten chapters, does a good job of prefacing any technical tool discussion with some discussion of the issues around the topic that should be considered first. The first chapter, for example, introduces the range of topics that surround enterprise infrastructure: architectures, methodologies, support ticketing systems, and other support issues. It touches on these topics briefly, offering links to related projects and tools that the author recommends. The cloud computing discussion in chapter 2 is limited to vended Google Cloud services, which makes sense. It does mention private cloud options such as OpenStack and briefly covers the pros and cons of considering private, public, and hybrid cloud models, as well as the best tool options for these.

Chapter 3 on kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is very helpful. The discussion of issues around selecting a KVM platform is excellent and current, and some helpful code snippets are included appropriately here (as they are throughout the book). Chapter 4, “MySQL, Git, and Postfix,” follows. Configuration management gets good coverage in chapter 5, with the focus being on Puppet, a popular tool for configuring and deploying standard server configurations in Red Hat Linux and its variants. Chapter 6 on enterprise issues around configuring the near-ubiquitous Apache goes into detail and issues of scale that the sysadmin has to deal with in small web environments; this is quite helpful. Monitoring is handled well in chapter 7, covering the popular Nagios and trend analysis with Cacti. Chapter 8’s discussion of the domain name system (DNS), Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), and the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) is valuable in terms of new issues that need to be considered in virtual hosts at scale. The final two chapters (9 and 10) cover log collection and troubleshooting with regards to the enterprise environment.

Overall, the structure of this book is quite helpful to the working sysadmin, organized helpfully for point-of-need and reference situations. Most of the topics do not go into great depth; the book instead provides enough external pointers and guidance to serve as a handy starting place for the sysadmin facing a new large project to scale up infrastructure. Recommended.

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