Install Rudder Agent

This chapter gives a general presentation of the Rudder Agent, and describes the different configuration steps to deploy the Rudder agent on the Nodes you wish to manage. Each Operating System has its own set of installation procedures.

The machines managed by Rudder are called Nodes, and can either be physical or virtual. For a machine to become a managed Node, you have to install the Rudder Agent on it. The Node will afterwards register itself on the server. And finally, the Node should be acknowledged in the Rudder Server interface to become a managed Node. For a more detailed description of the workflow, please refer to the Advanced Usage part of this documentation.

[Note]Components

This agent contains the following tools:

  1. The community version of CFEngine, a powerful open source configuration management tool.
  2. FusionInventory, an inventory software.
  3. An initial configuration set for the agent, to bootstrap the Rudder Root Server access.

These components are recognized for their reliability and minimal impact on performances. Our tests showed their memory consumption is usually under 10 MB of RAM during their execution. So you can safely install them on your servers.

We grouped all these tools in one package, to ease the Rudder Agent installation.

To get the list of supported Operating systems, please refer to the list of supported Operating Systems for the Nodes.