.gif)
Opsi (open pc server integration)
Encyclopedia
Opsi is a software distribution and management system for Windows
Clients, based on Linux
servers. Opsi is developed and maintained by uib GmbH from Mainz, Germany.
The main parts of Opsi are Open Source
licensed under the GNU General Public License
.
A tools for automated installations is important and necessary for standardization, maintainability and cost saving of larger PC networks.
opsi supports the client operating systems Windows XP
, Server 2003, Windows Vista
, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008R2
. The 32- and the 64-bit versions are supported. For the installation of an opsi-server there are packages available for the Linux distributions Debian
, Ubuntu
, SLES
, Univention Corporate Server, CentOS
, RHEL and OpenSuse
.
it loads a boot image
from the opsi-depotserver. This bootimage prepares the hard disk, copies the required installation files, drivers and the opsi client agent and starts finally an unattended OS-Installation. Opsi uses the automatic detection of the necessary drivers for PCI-, HD-Audio- and USB-Devices. OS-installation via Disk image
is also supported.
Every time the client boots the opsi-client-agent connects to the opsi-server and asks if there is anything to install (default).
If this shall be done a script driven installation program (opsi-winst) starts and installs the required software on the client. During the installation process the user login can be blocked for integrity reasons. To integrate a new software packet into the software deployment system, a script must be written to specify the installation process. This script provides all the information on how this software packet has to be installed silent or unattended or by using tools like AutoIt
or Autohotkey
. With the opsi-winst steps like copy files or edit the registry can be done.
The opsi-client-agent can also be triggered by other events or via push-installation from the opsi-server
and hotfix
es.
while the software information is gathered from the registry
. The inventory data are sent back to the opsi-server by a web service
. The inventory data may imported via a web service to a CMDB
e.g. in OTRS
.
. Using the combination of the License Management and the software inventory, Software Asset Management reports on the number of free and installed licenses can be generated. The License Management module is part of a Co-funding Project and not released as open source yet.
.
Management is also possible with a command line tool or via web service
.
according to the GNU General Public License
Version 3 and are free of charge.
The core features are software distribution (or software deployment
), OS deployment and hard- and software-inventory.
These free components can be supplemented with closed source add-ons that are fee required. They are called Co-funding Projects.
/Windows 7. It was completed on 1st of February 2008 and is free of charge since 1st of March 2010. The source code was divided from the not yet paid parts and is open source since since 30th of November 2010.
At the moment (January 2011) there are three co-funding projects: Treewiew allows to build hierarchical groups of clients to manage them, MySQL as backend for all data and the license management module.
The main focus of co-funding projects is to create software once for a pool of purchaser who share the cost and make it open source as soon as it paid in full.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
Clients, based on Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
servers. Opsi is developed and maintained by uib GmbH from Mainz, Germany.
The main parts of Opsi are Open Source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
licensed under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
.
Features
The key features of opsi are:- Automated operating system installation (OS deployment)
- Software distribution
- PatchPatch (computing)A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...
management - Inventory (hardware and software)
- License Management / Software Asset ManagementSoftware Asset ManagementSoftware asset management is a business practice that involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications within an organization...
A tools for automated installations is important and necessary for standardization, maintainability and cost saving of larger PC networks.
opsi supports the client operating systems Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
, Server 2003, Windows Vista
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008R2
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 and launched on October 22, 2009. According to the Windows Server Team blog, the retail availability was September 14, 2009. It is built on Windows NT 6.1, the same core...
. The 32- and the 64-bit versions are supported. For the installation of an opsi-server there are packages available for the Linux distributions Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
, Ubuntu
Ubuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
, SLES
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...
, Univention Corporate Server, CentOS
CentOS
CentOS is a free operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux . It exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution...
, RHEL and OpenSuse
OpenSUSE
openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE...
.
Automated operating system installation
Via management interface a client may be selected for OS-Installation. If the client boots via PXEPreboot Execution Environment
The Preboot eXecution Environment is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices or installed operating systems.PXE was introduced as part of the Wired for Management framework by Intel and is described in the specification The Preboot...
it loads a boot image
Boot image
A boot image is a type of disk image . When it is transferred onto a boot device it allows the associated hardware to boot....
from the opsi-depotserver. This bootimage prepares the hard disk, copies the required installation files, drivers and the opsi client agent and starts finally an unattended OS-Installation. Opsi uses the automatic detection of the necessary drivers for PCI-, HD-Audio- and USB-Devices. OS-installation via Disk image
Disk image
A disk image is a single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage medium or device, such as a hard drive, tape drive, floppy disk, CD/DVD/BD, or USB flash drive, although an image of an optical disc may be referred to as an optical disc image...
is also supported.
Software distribution
For the automatic software distribution some software, the opsi-client-agent, has to be installed on each client.Every time the client boots the opsi-client-agent connects to the opsi-server and asks if there is anything to install (default).
If this shall be done a script driven installation program (opsi-winst) starts and installs the required software on the client. During the installation process the user login can be blocked for integrity reasons. To integrate a new software packet into the software deployment system, a script must be written to specify the installation process. This script provides all the information on how this software packet has to be installed silent or unattended or by using tools like AutoIt
AutoIt
AutoIt is a freeware automation language for Microsoft Windows. In its earliest release, the software was primarily intended to create automation scripts for Microsoft Windows programs but has since grown to include enhancements in both programming language design and overall functionality.With...
or Autohotkey
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is a free, open source macro-creation and automation software utility which allows users to automate repetitive tasks. Any application user interface can be modified by AutoHotkey...
. With the opsi-winst steps like copy files or edit the registry can be done.
The opsi-client-agent can also be triggered by other events or via push-installation from the opsi-server
Patch-Management
The mechanism of the software deployment can also be used to deploy software patchesPatch (computing)
A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...
and hotfix
Hotfix
A hotfix was originally the term applied to software patches that were applied to live i.e. still running systems. Similar use of the terms can be seen in hot swappable disk drives...
es.
Inventory (hardware and software)
The hard- and software inventory also uses the opsi-client-agent. The hardware information is collected via calls to WMIWindows Management Instrumentation
Windows Management Instrumentation is a set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification...
while the software information is gathered from the registry
Windows registry
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...
. The inventory data are sent back to the opsi-server by a web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
. The inventory data may imported via a web service to a CMDB
CMDB
A configuration management database is a repository of information related to all the components of an information system. It contains the details of the configuration items in the IT infrastructure. Although repositories similar to CMDBs have been used by IT departments for many years, the term...
e.g. in OTRS
OTRS
OTRS, an initialism for Open-source Ticket Request System, is a free and open-source trouble ticket system software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to incoming queries and track further communications about them...
.
License management / Software Asset Management
The opsi License Management module supports the administration of different kinds of licenses like Retail, OEM and Volume licenses. It counts the licenses that are used with the software deploymentSoftware deployment
Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use.The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur at the producer site or at the consumer site or both...
. Using the combination of the License Management and the software inventory, Software Asset Management reports on the number of free and installed licenses can be generated. The License Management module is part of a Co-funding Project and not released as open source yet.
opsi-server
The opsi-server provides the following services:- The configuration-server stores the configuration data of the clients and provides the methods to manage these data via a web service or the command-line. The data can be stored in files, in OpenLDAPOpenLDAPOpenLDAP Software is a free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol developed by the OpenLDAP Project. It is released under its own BSD-style license called the OpenLDAP Public License. LDAP is a platform-independent protocol. Several common Linux distributions...
or in a MySQLMySQLMySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
Database. - The depot-server stores software packages that may be installed on the clients. To provide support for multiple locations, multiple depot-servers may be controlled by one configuration-server.
- A TFTPTrivial File Transfer ProtocolTrivial File Transfer Protocol is a file transfer protocol known for its simplicity. It is generally used forautomated transfer of configuration or boot files between machines in a local environment....
-Server provides the boot imageBoot imageA boot image is a type of disk image . When it is transferred onto a boot device it allows the associated hardware to boot....
s for the OS-Installations. - A DHCPDynamic Host Configuration ProtocolThe Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a network configuration protocol for hosts on Internet Protocol networks. Computers that are connected to IP networks must be configured before they can communicate with other hosts. The most essential information needed is an IP address, and a default...
-Server may be integrated in the opsi-server
Management interface
For managing opsi a graphical user interface is available as an application or as a browser AppletApplet
In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a larger program, often as a plug-in. An applet typically also refers to Java applets, i.e., programs written in the Java programming language that are included in a web page...
.
Management is also possible with a command line tool or via web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
.
License
The opsi core features are Open SourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
according to the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
Version 3 and are free of charge.
The core features are software distribution (or software deployment
Software deployment
Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use.The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur at the producer site or at the consumer site or both...
), OS deployment and hard- and software-inventory.
These free components can be supplemented with closed source add-ons that are fee required. They are called Co-funding Projects.
Co-funding projects
Even though opsi is open source, there are some components which are not for free at the moment. These components are developed in a co-funding project. This means, that these parts are only available for those customers who paid a contribution to the cost of development. As soon as the development of a co-funding project is refinanced, the component will be part of the free opsi-version and can be used free of charge. It will be open source (as long as not prevented caused by technical reasons). The first of these co-funding Projects was the opsi support for VistaVista
Vista usually refers to a distant view.Vista may also refer to:-Software:*Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007...
/Windows 7. It was completed on 1st of February 2008 and is free of charge since 1st of March 2010. The source code was divided from the not yet paid parts and is open source since since 30th of November 2010.
At the moment (January 2011) there are three co-funding projects: Treewiew allows to build hierarchical groups of clients to manage them, MySQL as backend for all data and the license management module.
The main focus of co-funding projects is to create software once for a pool of purchaser who share the cost and make it open source as soon as it paid in full.