34 ms·

This is an interesting concept and a good addition to all the IaaS offerings around. Just one year ago, while doing my Master's thesis, I pondered the possiblit

by Maakuth 12y ago

This is an interesting concept and a good addition to all the IaaS offerings around. Just one year ago, while doing my Master's thesis, I pondered the possiblity of creating an IaaS that didn't involve virtual machines but physical servers instead. This should be great especially for high performance and special hardware needs. Next step would be all sorts of mixed blends between virtual and physical servers: real CPUs and GPUs, but virtualized storage, networking or what have you.

angersock 12y ago
You've reinvented what we used to call dedicated servers. There is nothing new under the sun. Might as well call it physicalization. :)
- tealeg 12y ago
  :-) Of course it's not inventing anything, it's just providing a convenient way to commission those servers that can also be driven by other tools. If you bring a lot of server resource on line this is very handy. Juju, for example, can put things on MAAS servers, and one of the things it could put on there is a virtualised environment that could also be managed by MAAS and juju to deploy other workloads. MAAS knows some stuff about the hardware too, for example, how many network cards the machine has and on which networks, which means you can interrogate MAAS to find machines suitable for a given workload.
marcoceppi 12y ago
MAAS can already manage virtual machines to an extent (through libvirt) but adding storage support would be awesome.
rwmj 12y ago
Is this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal instances.
- pquerna 12y ago
  Amazon does not have a 'baremetal' instance type. OpenStack 'can', but in practice the baremetal nova driver[0] has many issues, and the newer OpenStack Ironic Project[1] is not yet ready for production workloads. Additionally, both baremetal and OpenStack Ironic have a focus on 'triple-O', or OpenStack on OpenStack[2] use cases -- that is using these projects to bootstrap an 'undercloud', for the hardware to be used by a higher level virtualized cloud. [0] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal [1] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic [2] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO
  - rwmj 12y ago
    Fair enough. I was totally convinced that Amazon had baremetal instances available, but now I cannot find anything, so that could probably be a figment of my imagination.
    - kikoreis 12y ago
      All of Amazon's EC2 compute instances are run on top of Xen; there is an interesting Reddit AMA post with a lot of detail: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_eng...
      - rwmj 12y ago
        That is a very interesting thread, thanks. I think I was confusing dedicated tenancy with baremetal. Dedicated tenancy of course still runs on Xen.
    - YokoZar 12y ago
      I believe at one point the GPU instances were being given direct hardware access to the GPU as virtualized GPUs weren't yet a thing. So the GPU part was sort of baremetal I guess.
teepo 12y ago
SoftLayer has been doing this since 2005. One API to provision and deploy compute on demand physical or virtual. Over 90% of their customer bases uses bare metal servers.

by Maakuth 12y ago

angersock 12y ago

You've reinvented what we used to call dedicated servers. There is nothing new under the sun. Might as well call it physicalization. :)

tealeg 12y ago
:-) Of course it's not inventing anything, it's just providing a convenient way to commission those servers that can also be driven by other tools. If you bring a lot of server resource on line this is very handy. Juju, for example, can put things on MAAS servers, and one of the things it could put on there is a virtualised environment that could also be managed by MAAS and juju to deploy other workloads. MAAS knows some stuff about the hardware too, for example, how many network cards the machine has and on which networks, which means you can interrogate MAAS to find machines suitable for a given workload.

marcoceppi 12y ago

MAAS can already manage virtual machines to an extent (through libvirt) but adding storage support would be awesome.

rwmj 12y ago

Is this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal instances.

pquerna 12y ago
Amazon does not have a 'baremetal' instance type. OpenStack 'can', but in practice the baremetal nova driver[0] has many issues, and the newer OpenStack Ironic Project[1] is not yet ready for production workloads. Additionally, both baremetal and OpenStack Ironic have a focus on 'triple-O', or OpenStack on OpenStack[2] use cases -- that is using these projects to bootstrap an 'undercloud', for the hardware to be used by a higher level virtualized cloud. [0] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal [1] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic [2] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO
- rwmj 12y ago
  Fair enough. I was totally convinced that Amazon had baremetal instances available, but now I cannot find anything, so that could probably be a figment of my imagination.
  - kikoreis 12y ago
    All of Amazon's EC2 compute instances are run on top of Xen; there is an interesting Reddit AMA post with a lot of detail: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_eng...
    - rwmj 12y ago
      That is a very interesting thread, thanks. I think I was confusing dedicated tenancy with baremetal. Dedicated tenancy of course still runs on Xen.
  - YokoZar 12y ago
    I believe at one point the GPU instances were being given direct hardware access to the GPU as virtualized GPUs weren't yet a thing. So the GPU part was sort of baremetal I guess.

teepo 12y ago

SoftLayer has been doing this since 2005. One API to provision and deploy compute on demand physical or virtual. Over 90% of their customer bases uses bare metal servers.