Overview
ZSphere Bare Metal Management provides dedicated physical servers for critical applications that require high performance and stability.
After racking the servers and completing the basic preparation, administrators can add bare metal chassis in batches and create bare metal instances from the UI. Bare metal templates support unattended batch operating system installation, while business networks can be configured for bare metal instances to meet different application requirements.
Core Concepts
- Bare Metal Template: With bare metal templates, preconfigured files can be quickly generated to achieve unattended bulk OS installation for bare metal instances.
- Bare Metal Cluster: A bare metal cluster consists of bare metal chassis.
- Deployment Server: An independent server used for providing PXE services and console proxies for bare metal chassis.
- Bare Metal Chassis: Bare metal chassis is used to create bare metal instances and can be universally identified by the BMC interface and IPMI configuration.
- Bare Metal Instance: A virtualized instance of bare metal chassis.
Advantages
- Dedicated physical resources
Provides dedicated physical servers for critical applications to ensure high performance and stability.
- Efficient batch deployment
- Adds bare metal chassis in batches from the UI. Chassis can be added manually or imported from a template, allowing you to configure IPMI addresses for multiple chassis at once and quickly build bare metal clusters.
- Uses bare metal templates for unattended operating system installation to improve operational efficiency.
- Flexible operating system support
Supports mainstream Linux distributions, including the RHEL/CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu, and SUSE/openSUSE families, as well as customized platform operating systems and custom installation requirements.
- Highly available deployment architecture
Supports highly available environments with two management nodes. A dedicated deployment server is recommended for each bare metal cluster to avoid single points of failure and DHCP conflicts.
Typical Use Cases
- Highly regulated environments
Industries such as finance and securities have stringent requirements for deployment compliance and data security. Dedicated resources and data isolation help make operations auditable and traceable.
- High-performance computing
Supercomputing, genome sequencing, and similar workloads require high compute performance, stability, and responsiveness. Deploying bare metal clusters avoids virtualization overhead and meets these performance requirements.
- Mission-critical databases
Databases that cannot run in virtual machines can use dedicated physical servers with isolated networks and predictable performance.