Understanding Bare Metal Server Management
In Contrail Networking, you can manage the life cycle of bare metal servers (BMS) by using a backend framework, which acts as a bare metal server (BMS) manager. The BMS management framework in Contrail uses the functionality provided by the following OpenStack services: Ironic, Nova, and Glance. The BMS Management framework or the BMS framework manages the bare metal workload with in a fabric. It includes BMS server life cycle management, onboarding of bare metal servers, bare metal image management, flavor management, inventory management, IP address management, security management, monitoring and reporting of life cycle management events, and discovery of bare metal servers.
An administrative user can configure the BMS framework and a tenant user can avail the services provided by the BMS framework. Figure 1 shows an architectural view of the BMS Management framework.
In single-tenant environments, administrative and tenant workflows are performed by the same user.
To avail the functionalities of the BMS framework, you must first deploy a Contrail cluster with OpenStack. After this, the administrative user needs to specify the details of the server or node to be added to the BMS available in nodes database, from the Contrail Command UI. The BMS framework then creates a record of this new node and adds them to the available nodes database.
The administrative user creates images, nodes, and flavors, which the tenant users use to deploy bare metal servers in their network. A tenant user selects one of these flavors and images that suit their need to deploy a bare metal server. The BMS framework monitors the state of the deployed servers and provides this information to analytics DB by using Sandesh, which is an XML-based protocol for reporting analytics information. All the nodes onboarded or registered with BMS manager are in Available state. After the tenant user has completed using the bare metal server and remove it, the server is then unprovisioned by the BMS framework and moved to the list of available nodes. Alternatively, the tenant user can remove the BMS instance from the tenant’s network. For example, if you want to rent a BMS from a service provider, the service provider deploys a BMS instance and gives you an IP address of the BMS instance, which you can use to access the BMS. Once you have completed using the BMS, you can delete the instance and the service provider reclaims the BMS. After reclaiming the BMS the service provider cleans it and rents it to the next client. The BMS framework in Contrail Networking manages all these tasks. If the service provider wants to remove the BMS instance from the service, they can delete it from the available servers and the next tenant will get a new BMS instance from a server.
The BMS framework can install tenant user-specific software images on BMS and attach them to the tenant user network in a multi-tenant cloud. It provides a single-click solution for the tenant users to manage the bare metal servers in their network.