ironic

This is part 4 in the series of BareMetal-as-a-Service with Ironic. In this article I will focus on highly distributed architectures. Baremetal cloud as a service for the edge and large environments.

What would be a good use of this architecture? I can think of few examples:

- managing lifecycle of hundreds of individual x86 servers monitoring production of the goods in manufacturing industry 

- almost any x86 based IOT use case

- managing highly distributed infrastructure sitting in stores for the large retailers

- managing unreleased server equipment directly...Read more

It is not a big deal for me to admit that I am a huge nerd when it comes to managing baremetal infrastructure in the datacenter. I feel like a dying breed in the times where everyone just wants to swipe their credit card and go to the public clouds. Nevertheless, there are still workloads out there that are too expensive to run in public cloud or too sensitive to be exposed in the "public" space. Proper automation and the management of the resources in the datacenter goes a long way in...Read more

I have to admit, it has taken me a while to produce this next article. Today, however it's about to change and I am happy to introduce on this blog OpenShift on OpenStack - no-brain on-prem solution for building apps. What makes this combination so special? Here is the short list of the top integration features:

- Fully Automated IPI experience

- Ability to deploy on mix of VMs and BM nodes

- With true multitenancy for VMs, BMs, Storage, Networking

- Dynamic , multi-tier storage as a service

- Best performance (No double network...Read more

So far we have learned how to configure and provision baremetal nodes with OpenStack Ironic in Part 1 of the blog. We also configured our deployment to allow zero-touch discovery in Part 2. The next "LEGO" building block is to allow our tenants/project to isolate their baremetal resources. This unique OpenStack feature can take advantage of neutron to reach out to top of rack switches (TORs) via ml2 driver and dynamically assign a VLAN id to switch ports for corresponding nodes. 

With this functionality, your tenants can take ownership of the pool...Read more

In first part of the series we have learned how to properly deploy OpenStack Ironic with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 (OSP13). Today we will take our deployment to the next level and enable Inspection and Autodiscovery for baremetal nodes in overcloud.

Please note OpenStack Inspector is not officially supported in OSP13 mostly due to limitation of not being capable to run in HA fashion. The limitation has been addressed and is planned to be part of the product in future release. In a mean time Red Hat requires to create support exception...Read more

OpenStack Ironic is one of the most exciting project I had pleasure to work with and help my clients with in the last year. Project Ironic is all about provisioning clusters of Baremetal nodes based on images stored in Glance with assigned networks managed by Neutron.

In the past Ironic has been neglected by System Architects and System Integrators mostly due to lack of feature parity comparable to more traditional baremetal bootstrap mechanisms. Now the feature gap has been mostly closed and at the same time Ironic can take advantages of other components and methodologies...Read more