Sunday, November 30, 2014

DSC - Configuration delivery modes

In the configuration management life cycle in DSC, configuration delivery plays a major role. Once a configuration is authored, a delivery mode helps to enact the configuration on the target systems. These modes dictate how the configuration is enforced and corrected, as required. DSC supports two types of delivery modes: Push and Pull.

PUSH mode

In the PUSH configuration delivery mode, the configuration to be enacted gets pushed to the node, whether it is local or remote. This is unidirectional and immediate. In a unidirectional mode the configuration is pushed from a management system to a target node. In push mode, the user initiates configuration processing via the Start-DscConfiguration cmdlet. This command immediately applies the configuration to the target, which can be specified by the -ComputerName parameter of the Start-DscConfiguration DSC cmdlet. By default, this cmdlet uses the files in the -Path folder to find the target node details and the configuration pushed to the node is enacted immediately.
The PUSH mode can be viewed as:

Note: Whether the target node is local or remote, it’s important to have the WinRM service up and running with the appropriate WinRM listeners.

Limitations of PUSH mode

The PUSH mode is easy to configure and use as it does not require any infrastructure services, such as a central shared location to host the configurations. However, the Push mode is not scalable. Pushing configuration to hundreds or thousands of systems would take quite long and can be limited, based on the resources available on the system on which the Start-DscConfiguration cmdlet is being run.
To enact configuration, we need all resource modules to be present on the target system. This represents another limitation of the Push mode. For example, if you have custom DSC resources used in a configuration script, the modules for these resources must be copied to target systems prior to pushing the configuration

PULL mode

Unlike the Push mode for configuration delivery, the Pull mode is bidirectional. This means that the pull server and the client both communicate with each other to manage the client configuration. In PULL mode the DSC Local Configuration Manager (LCM) can periodically poll a server for new configurations and keep the servers in compliance with the configuration and avoid drift. The Local Configuration Manager (LCM) of target node periodically performs a compliance check on the configuration of the node using a checksum on the MOF file. If the checksum is the same then nothing happens. Otherwise the LCM requests the new configuration and once it is transmitted to the client, the LCM executes it and also ensures that any missing resources that are part of the configuration is downloaded as well.

The PULL mode can be viewed as with the pull server configured to use SMB (Server Message Block)


To configure an SMB based pull server, you can use the New-SmbShare cmdlet to create a file share that can store the configuration and custom modules.

New-SmbShare -Name MySMBPullServer -Path E:\DSCShare -ReadAccess Everyone -Description "PULL server SMB"

Configuring the PULL client based on SMB

The download manager for SMB based pull clients is DSCFileDownloadManager. You can configure the LCM for SMB based pull clients by creating a configuration like and executing on the local machine

Configuration LCMSMBConfig {
                Node MyServer1 {
                                LocalConfigurationManager {
                                                ConfigurationID = '9C3DE0FC-FCB2-491F-B5EF-22DE7A368DE6'
                                                RefreshMode = "Pull"
                                                DownloadManagerName = "DscFileDownloadManager"
                                                DownloadManagerCustomData = @{SourcePath = "\\MyServer1\DSCResources"}
                                                ConfigurationModeFrequencyMins = 60
                                                RefreshFrequencyMins = 30
                                }
                }
}
LCMSMBConfig
Set-DscLocalConfigurationManager -Path .\LCMSMBConfig


Later when creating PULL configurations for the clients to react, you can use the GUID mentioned in the ConfiguationID property for the target machine as the Node value.

No comments: