Moving from MCollective to Puppet orchestrator

Puppet Enterprise 2018.1 is the last release to support MCollective. To prepare for these changes, migrate your MCollective work to  Puppet orchestrator to automate tasks and create consistent, repeatable administrative processes.

A benefit of moving to Puppet orchestrator is that its architecture requires less infrastructure than MCollective. These diagrams illustrate how distributing the Puppet agent workload with additional compile masters also requires additional ActiveMQ Brokers in an MCollective environment.





Move from MCollective to Puppet orchestrator

Move your MCollective workflows to orchestrator and take advantage of its integration with Puppet Enterprise console and commands, APIs, role-based access control, and event tracking.

Before you begin

Compare your current MCollective workflows to the corresponding features of PE.

Feature In MCollective In Puppet Enterprise
Deploy configuration changes and enforce the state of selected nodes.

Commands mco puppet runonce and mco puppet runall from mcmcollective-puppet-agent

Running Puppet on nodes

Install, uninstall, update, and check the status of packages on a node. Command mco package * from mcollective-package-agent puppetlabs-package module that installs with PE
Start, stop, and check the status of services running on a node. Command mco service * from mcollective-service-agent puppetlabs-service module that installs with PE
Limit user access to tasks that run on selected nodes. mcollective-actionpolicy-auth PE role-based access control (RBAC)

Make one-off changes to selected nodes.

 MCollective RPC Agents PE tasks
Target nodes that meet specific conditions. Filtering on facts Puppet Query Language
Discover facts about the nodes in your infrastructure. MCollective facts puppetlabs-facter_task module that installs with PE

  1. If your installation of MCollective uses ActiveMQ hubs and spokes to manage large deployments, install compile masters to share the Puppet agent workload.
  2. To replace MCollective RPC agents, recreate them as Puppet tasks.
  3. To filter nodes by facts, run Puppet on a PQL query that selects the target you want.
  4. To create plans that combine multiple tasks into a single command, install Bolt.
  5. When you are ready, remove MCollective from the nodes in your infrastructure.