1. Introduction

BlueBanquise is a generic stack, based on Ansible, whose purpose is to deploy and manage clusters of hosts. These clusters can be from few workstations in enterprise to very large HPC or servers farm clusters.

BlueBanquise is the result of a need. A need for a very simple stack, not based on multi languages scripts difficult to maintain. A stack that can keep simplicity while managing very complex architecture.

The BlueBanquise project also aims to train new system administrators to the deployment of bare metal servers.

The project relies on Ansible. Ansible was chosen for its simplicity and its security. The Ansible inventory groups/variables mechanism can cover from very simple to very sophisticated configurations. Ansible is not the fastest tool, nor the simplest to debug. However, it is easy to learn, and widely used today with an active community.

The BlueBanquise stack is made of multiple Ansible collections. The infrastructure collection is the largest one, and should be generic. Other collections allows to specialize the cluster of hosts.

This documentation is structured as the following:

• Few basic vocabulary

• Procedure to install BlueBanquise CORE

  • Bootstrap first management host

  • Configure BlueBanquise

  • Deploy cluster

• Procedures to specialize the cluster

If you encounter any bugs/issues or have any comments, please inform me.

Note also that since BlueBanquise is a multi-distribution based stack, parts of the documentation may be dedicated to a specific Linux distribution (always explicitly mentioned).

I hope you will enjoy this stack as much as I do developing it.

If you need help, do not hesitate to use the discussions tab of the project’s github.

Next step is to grab few basic Vocabulary.