Platform9 Managed Bare Metal With Metal³
What is Metal³
Platform9 comes with a full featured bare metal management component, that can bootstrap your physical servers, install your operating system of choice, configure networking, install any additional packages and bring up the physical servers to get them ready for next order configuration. Platform9 leverages the open source Metal³ project to achieve these capabilities which provides a Kubernetes Native API for managing bare metal hosts from a provisioning stack that is also running on Kubernetes. With Platform9 Managed Bare Metal with Metal³ you can deploy and redeploy your bare metal servers, at a single site or at 1000s of sites, at scale with ease of Kubernetes orchestration. This lets architects and DevOps teams automate and standardize deployments while removing the human error element from individual deployments at remote locations.
Metal³ is essentially a Kubernetes wrapper around Ironic, which it uses for declarative management of bare metal infrastructure for Kubernetes. By leveraging Ironic under the covers Metal³ benefits from leveraging a mature project that is widely adopted and integrated by industry vendors, provides good community support, and supports a variety of hardware. For an introduction to Ironic, we recommend reading the Ironic Documentation. *For more information on the *Metal³ Open Source Project we recommend visiting the Metal³ Project documentation.
For a better understanding of Platform9 Metal³ architecture and how it works under the hood, please read Metal³ Architecture
Benefits of Platform9 Managed Bare Metal with Metal³
See Metal³ Benefits for more details.
Who is this documentation for?
This documentation is for administrators and operators of Platform9 Metal³ who are responsible for deploying and managing physical server infrastructure for their organization. This is not intended to be general purpose Ironic documentation. Refer here for official Ironic documentation. This guide also assumes you are familiar with setting up and deploying Kubernetes using Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK). If not, refer to the getting started with PMK as a prerequisite step. This will also guide you on supported cluster infrastructure, operating systems, and other requirements to get your clusters up and running before you begin deploying VMs or containers on them.
Getting started
Refer to Quick Setup Guide For Metal³ to understand how to get started.
Understand the Architecture
Refer to Platform9 Managed Bare Metal with Metal³ Architecture. for an in-depth understanding of how Platform9 Metal³ works.