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Chapter 11.
135
Bare Metal Installation
You can set up bare metal hosts in a CloudPlatform cloud and manage them with the Management
Server. Bare metal hosts do not run hypervisor software. You do not install the operating system –
that is done using PXE when an instance is created from the bare metal template which you are going
to create as part of this Installation procedure. Bare metal hosts use basic networking. A cloud can
contain a mix of bare metal instances and virtual machine instances.
CloudPlatform 4.2 supports the kick start installation method for RPM-based Linux operating systems
on baremetal hosts in basic zones. Users can provision a baremetal host managed by CloudPlatform
as long as they have the kick start file and corresponding OS installation ISO ready.
11.1. Bare Metal Host System Requirements
Bare metal hosts can run any of the following operating systems. The hardware must meet the
requirements published by the OS vendor. Please consult the OS documentation for details. Bare
metal kick start installation is tested on CentOS 5.5, CentOS 6.2, CentOS 6.3, Fedora 17, and Ubuntu
12.04.
Aside from the requirements of the selected OS, bare metal hosts additionally must meet the following
requirements:
• All hosts within a cluster must be homogenous. The CPUs must be of the same type, count, and
feature flags.
• 32-bit or 64-bit x86 CPU (more cores results in better performance)
• 4 GB of memory
• 36 GB of local disk
• At least 1 NIC
11.2. About Bare Metal Kickstart Installation
Kickstart installation eliminates manual intervention during OS installation. It uses a text file as a script
to automate installation. The kickstart file contains responses to all the user input prompts that are
displayed when you install an operating system. With kickstart installation, you can automate the
installation of operating system software on large numbers of hosts.
Support for kickstart is provided by the anaconda installer. You can find out more at http://
fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart. Anaconda is used by the various Linux distributions
supported for CloudPlatform bare metal hosts (see Section 11.1, “Bare Metal Host System
Requirements”). A complete description of kickstart files is outside the scope of this documentation.
Luckily, there is plentiful documentation available. We have also provided some example kickstart files
later in this document.
• Red Hat / CentOS
Docs: http://www.centos.org/docs/6/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/ch-kickstart2.html
Example: Section 11.3.18, “Example CentOS 6.x Kickstart File”
• Fedora
Docs: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Installation_Guide/ch-kickstart2.html