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SUSE Edge Documentation / Components / Metal3

10 Metal3

 

Metal3 is a CNCF project which provides bare-metal infrastructure management capabilities for Kubernetes.

Metal3 provides Kubernetes-native resources to manage the lifecycle of bare-metal servers which support management via out-of-band protocols such as Redfish.

It also has mature support for Cluster API (CAPI). This enables management of hardware resources across multiple infrastructure providers via broadly adopted vendor-neutral APIs. Cluster API uses Metal3 as an infrastructure backend for Machine objects.

10.1 How does SUSE Edge use Metal3?

 

SUSE Edge uses Metal3 to manage the lifecycle of physical hardware, such as servers. The hardware needs to support an out-of-band management protocol that is supported by Metal3 (e.g. Redfish). When a SUSE Edge management cluster provisions or deprovisions downstream clusters, Metal3 will interact with a server’s BMC via Redfish. The following actions are typically part of this interaction:

  • Mount and umount Virtual Media.

  • Power on, power off, and reset servers.

This approach is useful for scenarios where the target hardware supports out-of-band management, and a fully automated infrastructure management flow is desired.

Metal3 and CAPI provide declarative APIs that enable inventory and state management of bare-metal servers, including automated inspection, cleaning, and provisioning/deprovisioning.

10.2 Known issues

 

  • The upstream IP Address Management controller is currently not supported, because it is not yet compatible with our choice of network configuration tooling. However the ipam-controller-manager pod hosted on the metal3-ipam-system namespace is needed as CAPM3 requires the ipam CRDs to exist.

  • Relatedly, the IPAM resources and Metal3DataTemplate networkData fields are not supported.

  • Only deployment via redfish-virtualmedia is currently supported.