The network traffic model for bare metal management includes the management network, distributed port group, IPMI network, and deployment network.
Management Network: Used to manage hardware resources associated with the platform.
Distributed Port Group: Serves as the service network for bare metal instances to provide application services.
IPMI Network: Used by the management node to perform remote operations on bare metal chassis and bare metal instances, such as powering on/off, rebooting, and retrieving hardware information.
Deployment Network: Used by the PXE sever to assign IP addresses via the DHCP service and to transfer images via the TFTP service.
See Figure 1 for an illustration.Figure 1. Bare Metal Network Topology
The core of the bare metal management: hardware information retrieval and unattended deployment of bare metal chassis.
Bare metal management workflow:
The management node directs the bare metal chassis to perform a PXE boot via the PXE server.
The PXE server provides DHCP, TFTP, and image storage services. After the bare metal device boots through PXE, it obtains an IP address through DHCP, downloads pxelinux.0 and boot files from the TFTP server, loads the kernel into memory, and boots into a LiveCD system.
In the LiveCD system, a detection script runs and reports the hardware information of the bare metal chassis back to the management node.
Based on the returned hardware information, a preconfigured template is applied to the bare metal chassis. This template includes partition information, NIC bonding, IP address, and more.
Select an OS ISO for installation to deploy the bare metal instance.
The bare metal chassis is rebooted for a PXE boot. The PXE server pre-downloads the target OS ISO, and the bare metal chassis performs an unattended deployment according to the preconfigured template. After deployment, the chassis automatically configures the NIC and other settings based on the preconfigured template, completing the bare metal instance configuration.
To simplify operations management for bare metal hosts, the PXE server can deploy a monitoring service that collects CPU, memory, disk capacity, disk I/O, NIC, and other metrics from the hosts in real time.
