Bare Metal Controller Overview

The bare metal Controller is the component of Platform9 Managed Bare Metal (PMB) is the point of presence within the data center. It directly manages the discovery, provisioning, deployment, and ongoing lifecycle management of the bare metal servers. It also communicates to the Platform9 SaaS management plane, in order to enable these management functions, such as instant provisioning, OS deployments, and upgrades.

Core Network Requirement

The Controller is the only component of PMB that needs to be installed on-premises, such that it and all the bare metal servers to be managed in that region are connected to the same flat provisioning network. The provisioning network is used for communications between the Controller and the bare metal servers, and should be a dedicated network. The bare metal servers can have as many other network interfaces as needed for other connectivity, but the provisioning network must be a dedicated one for PMB.

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 not only discovers and orchestrates the baremetal cloud, it hosts an image library that will contain any application and operating system images that will be made available to users of the bare metal cloud.

Recommended Specifications for POC

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