Plan the physical network environment, including the deployment network, IPMI network, management network, and business network, as shown in Figure 1.Figure 1. Bare Metal Network Topology
Plan the deployment network.
Make sure that the PXE NIC on each bare metal chassis can communicate with the DHCP listening NIC on the deployment server (PXE server) through the deployment network.
Access the BIOS of each bare metal chassis and enable PXE on the NIC connected to the deployment network.
For some server models, make sure that the PXE NIC is the first boot NIC, or disable PXE on all NICs with a higher boot priority.
You do not need to manually change the BIOS boot order, which typically prioritizes booting from the hard disk. The system automatically triggers a one-time PXE boot.
To avoid a single point of failure, use a dedicated deployment server.
The DHCP listening NIC on the deployment server must be a dedicated NIC with an IP address so that it can provide stable DHCP services.
Make sure that no DHCP service other than the one on the deployment server is available on the deployment network.
Plan the IP address assigned to each bare metal instance according to your production environment.
Configure IPMI for each bare metal chassis and plan the IPMI network.
Consider the following requirements:
For out-of-band management, each bare metal chassis must have a BMC interface. Configure the IPMI address, port, username, and password for each chassis. Make sure that the management nodes can communicate with the BMC interfaces through the IPMI network.
If a bare metal chassis supports the BMC ShareLink Management Port, disable it in the BIOS so that the chassis has only one IPMI address.
Figure 2. Disable the BMC ShareLink Management Port
Plan the management network and business networks.
Make sure that the image storage and deployment servers can communicate with the management nodes through the management network.
To configure business networks for bare metal instances, attach the required distributed switches to the bare metal cluster in advance.
Software Preparation
Prepare ISO images in the image storage for installing operating systems on bare metal instances.
Bare metal instances support customized platform operating systems and mainstream Linux distributions, including the RHEL/CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu, and SUSE/openSUSE families.
