Foreman

Foreman

Foreman is an open-source platform for the comprehensive management of physical and virtual machines—from initial boot to decommissioning.

At its core is automated provisioning: Foreman supports PXE/TFTP-based network booting, the passing of Kickstart or Preseed configurations, as well as direct integration with virtualization platforms such as VMware, oVirt/RHEV, and libvirt. Cloud environments such as OpenStack or EC2 can also be integrated. New systems can thus be set up fully automatically—without manual intervention.

Foreman also serves as a central lifecycle management tool. It maintains an overview of all managed systems, their assigned roles, operating systems, environments, and locations. Fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) allows responsibilities to be clearly delineated—an important aspect in larger teams and regulated environments.

Foreman is particularly strong in integration with configuration management systems such as Puppet, Ansible, or Salt. Configuration classes and parameters can be assigned directly in the Foreman interface to hosts and host groups. Agent reports are collected and evaluated, ensuring that the current state of the entire infrastructure is always transparent.

A comprehensive REST API and a CLI tool (Hammer) enable the full automation of all Foreman functions—whether as part of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code workflows, or your own operational processes. credativ supports companies in implementing and operating Foreman as a core component of a modern, automated infrastructure.