upgrading 2.6 (and assorted addons) -> latest shiny ?

[Dick Davies]

I've got a puppet 2.6 deployment (w. passenger) with mcollective 1.0 sprinkled in,

happily managing about 200 centos/rhel nodes. Recently we added Foreman 1.1 in just to 

get a reporting dashboard.

We never used storeconfigs (didn't want to throw a DB into the mix as we grew

it out) and it's starting to show cracks - not in performance, just in hackiness

(lots of 'module::settings::shared_between_2_modules' and so on, just to share

state between nodes). hiera is helping a lot there, though we're using a creaky

old version i added in by hand.

What I'd like to do this summer is get us up to puppet 3.x , uplift mcollective and

look at PuppetDB in there too (mainly to share facts etc. outside the puppet admin

team; we have a homegrown inventory CRUD webapp that essentially duplicates all

the information we already have in puppet, mainly because we don't have an easy

way to expose it).

My reading suggests it's worth going to puppet 3 first (fresh puppetmaster, copy over

/etc/puppet and SSL bits and bobs, migrate nodes to test and eventually flip DNS

for puppet.ourthing.com over). Then mcollective, then add in puppetdb later on.

The only other fly in the ointment is we currently get

puppet from EPEL and so need to start mirroring the puppetlabs repos I guess.

Does this sound sane-ish? Or would people recommend trying a 2.7 stepping stone

first? My main worry is the scoping changes in 3.x, since without storeconfigs we have

a lot of globals flying around...