[Infrastructures] isconf4 status and current best practice for system provisioning

[Jon Sabo]

I was reading about isconf4 on the trac wiki and I read the Turing
paper.  Is isconf4 useable now and what are you using now for system
provisioning aka installing the os right now untill its done....  Is
this just for one particular os like linux or does it incorporate
other useful os's like solaris and freebsd. It seems untill isconf4 is
done, assuming its not useable now, cfengine will works well for
maintaining configuration across sets of systems.  Do you use system
imager and how do you feel about using system imager for maintaining
system configuration....It can pull from a gold system.  I see that
isconf4 doesnt work that way and everything will be distributed.  I
was also wondering if anyone uses vmware images for gold servers. 
Using the snapshot feature as tag of the os at a certain point and
just bring up vmware images when it was time to roll out some
configuration change rather than use multiple physical servers.

Thanks,

Jonathan