Baremetal Automation
The bare metal automation in IronCore is designed to provide a comprehensive solution for managing physical servers in a Kubernetes-native way. It leverages the power of Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to automate:
- Discovery: Automatically detect and register bare metal servers.
- Provisioning: Deploy and configure servers using Ignition.
- Day-2 Operations: Manage BIOS, firmware, and hardware inventory declaratively.
- 3rd Party Integrations: Seamlessly integrate with existing tools like vendor-specific management tools.
- Kubernetes Support: Run Kubernetes on bare metal servers with support of Cluster API and Gardener.
Core Components
The core components of the bare metal automation in IronCore include:
- Metal Operator: The central component that manages the lifecycle of bare metal servers.
- Boot Operator: iPXE and HTTP boot server that provides boot images and Ignition configurations.
- FeDHCP: A DHCP server that provides in-band and out-of-band network configuration to bare metal servers.
Concepts and Usage Guides
Usage guides and concepts for the metal-operator API types can be found in the metal-operator documentation.
Prerequisites
The current implementation of the bare metal automation in IronCore requires the following prerequisites:
- In-band and out-of-band network connectivity to the bare metal servers.
- A management server in the out-of-band network that can communicate with the bare metal servers.
- A Kubernetes cluster setup on this management server.
INFO
The bootstrap of this management server and the Kubernetes cluster will be covered in a later version of this documentation.