Platform9 Managed Bare Metal Architecture
Platform9 Managed Bare Metal (PMB) is a SaaS-managed Bare Metal platform that is vendor agnostic and helps you transform your bare metal physical infrastructure in your data centers, co-locations or edge locations - into an agile self-service bare metal cloud.
PMB can manage hardware through both common (eg. PXE and IPMI) and vendor-specific remote management protocols. PMB provides the cloud operator with a unified interface to a heterogeneous inventory of physical servers across diverse data center locations, and enables them to build REST API based end to end automation for provisioning, updates and other management of their bare metal stack.
Building your cloud infrastructure is a complex process, with physical infrastructure management being one of the hardest aspects of it.
Commonly used physical infrastructure management tools are typically built with static infrastructure in mind - one that is deployed once and then rarely updated over the 5 years lifecycle before the hardware needs to be replaced.
Hardware-vendor built tooling to manage physical infrastructure is typically vendor specific. It’s also not built to handle disconnected states, management over WAN or large scale to support multiple geographically diverse locations.
Management of your cloud and edge infrastructure at scale requires dynamic, scalable and resilient management tooling that isn’t trapped in the datacenter.
To efficiently scale cloud and edge infrastructure, businesses require tooling that can be vendor-agnostic, and can support dynamic provisioning, disconnected states, allow running any application workload and simplifies operational complexities.
PMB provides such a hardware agnostic bare metal cloud provisioning platform that can be leveraged in the datacenter or at edge locations to build infrastructure-as-code based under-clouds, expand VM only clouds to include dynamically provisioned bare metal nodes that can then be used to either run performance sensitive workloads directly on the metal, or VMs or Kubernetes and containers. PMB is designed with unique capabilities to also effectively manage edge data centers, enabling businesses to create new customer experiences on a zero latency computing platform supported by Platform9 that is sustainable, repeatable and scalable.
PMB Components
PMB consists of two main components - the Platform9 SaaS Management Plane and the bare metal Controller, our point of control for your physical server infrastructure. The Management Plane and the Controller work together to orchestrate the bare metal cloud via APIs or the Web App. The Controller acts the control point for physical assets in your data center, listening for new servers via a dedicated provisioning network, once detected servers are on-boarded and become available for deployment. The Controller is also responsible for the life cycle of deployed physical servers, nodes, and enables users to dynamically decide the role of a given node at any given time.
Management Plane
Central to Platform9 is the SaaS management plane that provides an API and a WebApp for controlling Managed OpenStack, Managed Kubernetes and Managed Bare Metal. The Management Plane supports multi-tenancy and region based controls which enable edge sites to be managed from a central location.
Controller
The PMB controller is the on-premise counterpart of the Management Plane. The Controller can be deployed on a virtual machine or a physical server as part of your on-premise physical infrastructure. Once deployed, the Controller connects outbound with the cloud hosted Management plane and is then used for onboarding, provisioning and life cycle control of your on-premise physical servers. In edge environments, the PMB Controller can be deployed across WAN to have one controller manage multiple edge servers.
A common server edge deployment scenario would see the PMB configured with regions for each location and a Controller server deployed alongside the physical servers. This architecture enables CI/CD deployments to host repositories on the Controller and remove lengthy delays in build/deployment processes. A local Controller server also enables simplified networking and secure WAN or SD-WAN configurations.
