Not that I’m a Canonical stan, or anything. But have you looked at MAAS [1]? It ...

cedws · on March 15, 2021

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just a tool to install a chosen OS (for example Ubuntu)?

andrewjf · on March 15, 2021

I mean yes... but in bare metal there's a lot of things that need to be handled:

- Network topology management, IP address management (IPAM) and host associations (DNS, DHCP services or Static IP assignment)

- IPMI to power on/off machine and change boot orders, serial consoles

- Disk configuration (MD raid sets, LVM configuration, partitioning)

- Firmware of all the components

- Burn-in testing

- Passing configuration to the host OS for application/OS configuration

- Detecting hardware failures and tracking response.

- Install the OS

MaaS does most of these things, but it's all the life of bare metal. So "just a tool to install a chosen OS" undersells the complexity in this space.

busterarm · on March 16, 2021

https://github.com/Roblox/terraform-provider-maas

There's even a terraform provider in development.

mesebrec · on March 15, 2021

It's what I think of when I hear "bare metal management".

It manages a fleet of physical servers and provides an API to provision servers, configure networks, and install operating systems. Basically an easier alternative to OpenStack for bare metal servers.

It supports ipmi and a bunch of other BMC's, uses pxe to deploy the operating systems, optionally runs its own DNS and DHCP servers and integrated with stuff like SMART to verify server health before deploying operating systems.

I use it in my research group to manage a fleet of about two dozen servers.