I had a modest epiphany some weeks back thinking about server configuration management: if you want to manage configurations on a given node (to use Chef lingo), it's best to work within a system that facilitates and/or encourages this.

For a number of reasons, Debian (or faithful derivatives) comes closest to this of any platform I've encountered.

That said: fabric appears to be little more than a multi-system aware task runner. Somewhat like dsh (distributed ssh / dancer's shell): http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html

... or like Capistrano, as the Debian package description suggests (modulo installing Rails).

There's a bad pimp joke around "idempotence" waiting to be made.

Your task here would seem to install Oracle's Java 7 HostSpot JVM.

How do you get around the licensing question(s) (or is that what the "-y" is for)?