On-demand Bare Metal instances in Public Cloud

IaaS

On-demand Bare Metal instances in Public Cloud

Physical servers orchestrated by OpenStack Ironic

We have been providing on-demand resources through Public Cloud since 2015 and we are very excited to invite you to be the first to test our next big feature: Bare Metal instances.

The best of both worlds: dedicated servers with the flexibility of cloud

A Bare Metal instance looks like a classical instance (usualy using virtualisation) by providing you a physical server fully dedicated to your usage.

A Bare Metal instance is a single-tenant physical server, dedicated solely to your usage. You enjoy 100% of the hardware power, with no hypervisor and no virtualisation layer.

Thanks to OpenStack Ironic, it is now possible to provision Bare Metal instances instead of virtual ones on our OpenStack-powered Public Cloud. You can use the API with your preferred tools to manage these bare-metal instances: the OpenStack CLI or Horizon.

Use cases

While the virtualisation approach is useful for many cases, some workloads need the power of Bare Metal.

For example, if you have to host a database which serves many requests/s, a Bare Metal instance will deliver all the hardware power to answer quickly.

You also could have your own solution to orchestrate containers, bare metal instances will avoid the virtualisation layer to run containers directly on the host.

Finally, you could have very specific network latency requirement that virtual instances couldn't answer. Bare Metal instance will offer you a faster network.

Available features
Create instance
Delete instance
Rebuild instance
Boot on rescue
Hard reboot instance
Use cloud-init	(using config-drive)
Fast instance spawn	(less than 3 minutes !)
Software RAID	(no raid, raid 0 or raid 1)
Plug Private Networks	(using vRack)
Snapshots	(cold snapshots)

Features in backlog
Failover IPs	soon
Plug Cinder Volumes	soon
Resize instance	soon
Use security groups	soon (using cold snapshot)
Console access	soon

Hardware

The aim of this Beta is to validate the features more than identify the ideal catalog of flavors.

During the beta phase, one flavor will be available :

CPU : 4 Cores / 8 Threads
RAM: 32 GB
DISK: NVMe 450GB x 2
NET: NIC 10 Gb

Conditions

Currently, this lab is in the beta phase. This means that there are limited resources. Customers who answered the registration form (below), will be granted as soon as resources will be available.
This lab is free during the beta period, that means that there will be no charge for Bare Metal instances.
No Service Level Agreement for this Beta, please do not host any business critical workloads or personal data on the service.
When the beta period ends, the services will be terminated. You should therefore not leave critical data on these machines and ensure to back up regularly.
This lab is hosted on a dedicated OpenStack region named "GRA9" running the Stein OpenStack version.

Documentation

Here are some examples of how to use it with the OpenStack CLI. You will notice that you can also use it with the GUI OpenStack Horizon or the OVH web console.

Load the environment variables as usual and change the region to target the dedicated ironic region.

source openrc
export OS_REGION_NAME=GRA9

List the available flavors.

openstack flavor list | grep metal

List the available images.

openstack image list --public | grep "Baremetal"

Current image list: Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 21.04), Debian (9, 10)

Launch a Bare Metal instance with Ubuntu 20.10 with RAID0 configured (optional) and attached Private Network (using the vlanName you want to attach your node to). For the moment, it is only possible to attach your Baremetal node to the default vlan (vlan ID = 0). As the feature is still in BETA, we advise to not use the Private Network of your Production Environment.

openstack server create --flavor metal.eg-32 --image "Baremetal - Ubuntu 21.04" --network=Ext-Net-Baremetal --network=vlanName --property soft_raid=0 SERVERNAME

Create a Snapshot or your Baremetal node (WARNING: the Object Storage needed to store the image will be billed at normal price).

openstack server image create SERVERNAME --name myServernameSnapshot

How to share your feedbacks

Cloud ML : cloud@ml.ovh.net
Gitter : ovh/BareMetal-aaS
Github : https://github.com/ovh/public-cloud-roadmap/issues/42

FAQ

Can I connect a Bare Metal instance to the vRack in order to use private networks

This feature is not available, we hope to deliver it soon.

Can I plug additional disks to my bare metal instance?

This feature is in the pipeline but it's not yet available.

Will Bare Metal instances stay in a dedicated OpenStack region?

Bare Metal instances are available in a specific region for the beta period. When we move them into production, we'll provide this feature to other regions next to virtual instances and other services.

Can I use the same image I use for virtual instances?

OVH provides images for bare-metal servers, configured for this use case and UEFI is used to boot the server. In addition to that, you can also upload your own image.

Will these Bare Metal instances be available as Managed Kubernetes Worker nodes ?

Yes, at a later stage, you will be able to choose to add both virtual machine and Bare Metal instances as worker nodes in our Managed Kubernetes service.

Status

Alpha
Beta
Early Access
General Availability