Comment Re:Fun at scale. (Score 1) 500
cfengine, puppet, chef et all are in the set of acceptable solutions. And if you have per-host information you care about keeping, superior to blindly reimaging.
But why do you have per-host information? Per-host information (log files, or important data on local storage) is an inherent management pain. The best answer is to keep that to the minimum set of hosts possible, and use coarse tools on the majority. Then you're manually managing 2 hosts, and bulk managing 998. Which is a cubic ton better than manually managing most of 1000 hosts. (remote syslog is your friend.)
(Upgrade? Really? Um, no. Reinstall. Again, you have to be able to reinstall quickly and accurately. And since you can do that, why not do that?)