Bare Metal Controller Overview

The bare metal controller is a component of Platform9 Managed Bare Metal (PMB) offering that gets deployed within your data center. Once deployed, the controller connects with the PMB SaaS platform and facilitates management operations such as discovery, provisioning, deployment, and ongoing lifecycle management of the physical servers within your data center.

Network Requirement

The PMB controller and all the bare metal servers to be managed by PMB must be connected on a flat and dedicated network. This network is called the provisioning network. The provisioning network is used for communications between the controller and the bare metal servers. The bare metal servers may have multiple other network interfaces, but the provisioning network must be a separate and dedicated network use for the sole purpose of management of servers by PMB

Controller Form Factor

The bare metal controller can run on a physical or virtual machine, as long as it is connected to the dedicated provisioning network described above.

Image Library

The bare metal controller hosts an image library that will contain any application and/or operating system images that can be used to provision bare metal servers.

Recommended Specifications

To deploy the bare metal controller in a pilot or proof of concept environment Platform9 recommends the use of a physical server to simplify network and VLAN configuration. The bare metal controller must be running CentOS 7.6 and have at least 4 CPUs, 16 BG of RAM and 120GB of hard drive space.