What is Elastic Baremetal Management?

Elastic Baremetal Management provides dedicated physical servers for your applications to ensure high performance and stability. In addition, this feature allows elastic scaling. You can apply for and scale resources based on your needs. Elastic Baremetal Management integrates the benefits of hosts and VM instances. It delivers powerful and stable computing capacities of hosts and allows you to use primary storages, L3 networks, and other resources on the Cloud for your applications. This way, it avoids virtualization overheads and allows flexible use of cloud resources and physical resources, thus promoting the availability of cloud resources. You can use this feature to deploy applications for traditional non-virtualization scenarios.
Note:
  • The Elastic Baremetal Management feature is provided in a separate module. Before you can use this feature, you need to purchase the Plus License of Elastic Baremetal Management, in addition to the Base License.
  • A tenant can use an elastic baremetal offering shared by the admin to create an elastic baremetal instance.

Concepts

  • Provision network: A provision network is a dedicated network for PXE boot and image downloads while creating elastic baremetal instances.
    • Before you can use Elastic Baremetal Management, you need to deploy an IPv4 provision network.
    • Provision networks require high network performance. We recommend that you use at least 10 Gigabit NICs for your provision network.
    • You can configure a gateway for your provision network. This way, the provision network can be connected to other networks. If you do not need to connect your provision network with other networks, you do not need to configure a gateway for your provision network.
  • Elastic baremetal cluster: An elastic baremetal cluster consists of elastic baremetal instances. You can manage elastic baremetal instances by managing an elastic baremetal cluster where the instances reside.
    • You must attach a provision network to an elastic baremetal cluster to provide PXE services for baremetal nodes in the cluster.
    • You can attach only one provision network to an elastic baremetal cluster. However, you can attach a provision network to multiple elastic baremetal clusters.
    • You can attach an L2 network to an elastic baremetal cluster to provide an extended L2 business network for elastic baremetal instances in the cluster. Elastic baremetal instances and VM instances that share the same L2 network with the elastic baremetal instances can access each other without using the gateway. The L2 network that you can attach to an elastic baremetal cluster can be of the VLAN or NoVLAN type.
  • Gateway node: A gateway node is a node where the ingress and egress traffic of the Cloud and elastic baremetal instances is forwarded.
    • You can attach multiple gateway nodes to an elastic baremetal cluster. However, you can attach only one multiple gateway node to an elastic baremetal cluster.
    • A gateway node is used to take over primary storages and assign storage space for elastic baremetal instances.
    • A gateway node provides iPXE, DHCP, and other services. It is used to deliver configuration settings to elastic baremetal instances.
  • Baremetal node: A baremetal node is used to create a baremetal instance and is identified based on the BMC interface and IPMI configuration setting.
    • The management node must be connected to the IPMI network to remotely manage baremetal nodes.
    • Baremetal nodes must be configured with the BMC interface, IPMI address, port, username, and password, and be connected to the IPMI network.
    • A baremetal node can be distributed to only one elastic baremetal instance and an elastic baremetal instance can only be assigned one baremetal node.
    • You can provide compute resources for elastic baremetal instances based on the baremetal node or baremetal offering.
    • You can power off an elastic baremetal instance to release the associated baremetal node. When an elastic baremetal instance is powered off, the associated baremetal node is automatically released and can be used by another elastic baremetal instance. This mechanism avoids resource idling.
  • Elastic baremetal instance offering: An elastic baremetal offering defines the number of vCPU cores, memory size, CPU architecture, CPU model, and other configuration settings of elastic baremetal instances.
    • After you obtain the hardware information of a baremetal node on the UI, you can obtain the corresponding elastic baremetal offering. The Cloud allows you to manage baremetal nodes of the same elastic baremetal offering in a unified way.
    • You can use an elastic baremetal offering to create an elastic baremetal instance. You can also release the advanced settings of baremetal nodes to avoid resource idling.
    • You can create a pricing list for elastic baremetal instances based on elastic baremetal offerings. Then bills are generated for the elastic baremetal instances based on their usage.
  • Elastic baremetal instance: An elastic baremetal instance has the same performance as physical servers and allows elastic scaling. You can apply for and scale resources based on your needs.
    • Baremetal nodes provide compute resources for elastic baremetal instances. SharedBlock or Ceph primary storages on the Cloud provide storage resources. The provision network provides support for PXE boot. L3 networks on the Cloud are used as the business networks of elastic baremetal instances.
    • We recommend that you create an elastic baremetal instance by using an image that has installed the agent. Otherwise, you cannot open the console of the elastic baremetal instance, modify the password of the instance, attach a volume to or detach a volume from the instance, or attach a network to or detach a network from the instance.
    • The BIOS mode of the image used to create an elastic baremetal instance is defaulted to UEFI. To use an image whose BIOS mode is Legacy, contact the official technical support.
    • You can attach an L2 network to an elastic baremetal cluster to provide an extended L2 business network for elastic baremetal instances in the cluster. Elastic baremetal instances and VM instances that share the same L2 network with the elastic baremetal instances can access each other without using the gateway. The L2 network that you can attach to an elastic baremetal cluster can be of the VLAN or NoVLAN type.
    • You can configure business networks for elastic baremetal instances. If you attach an L2 network to the cluster where your baremetal nodes reside, elastic baremetal instances and VM instances that share the same L2 network with the elastic baremetal instances can access each other without using the gateway.

Scenarios

  • Scenarios that require high security and strict monitoring:

    The financial and insurance industries have high requirements over business deployment compliance and data security. In these scenarios, you can use Baremetal Management to secure dedicated resources, data isolation, easy management, and operation-tracking. This way, you can ensure the reliability and security compliance of your key business system and data.

  • High-performance computing scenarios:

    In supercomputing, genome sequencing, and other high-performance computing scenarios, the requirements over the computing performance, stability, and timeliness of the server are very high. The Baremetal Management feature is fitting for these scenarios. In addition, the feature can be used for scenarios that require high throughput or high computing performance that can accommodate changing access requests and scenarios. Virtualization and hyperthreading may compromise some performance. Deploying a reasonable number of baremetal clusters can meet the high-performance computing requirements.

  • Key database scenarios:

    To meet business requirements, you may not want to deploy some key databases on VM instances while want to deploy the databases on physical servers that feature dedicated resources, network isolation, and guaranteed performance. In these scenarios, you can use Baremetal Management to provide dedicated high-performance physical servers for your applications.

Considerations

When you use the Elastic Baremetal Management feature, note that:
  • The server that you prepare must have at least one PXE boot NIC used for network management. Make sure the first port of the first NIC of the server is used as the provision NIC.
  • You can use x86 servers and Kunpeng and other China localized mainstream ARM servers as baremetal nodes.
  • You can use x86 servers as gateway nodes. If you use an ARM server as a baremetal node, you need to add ARM repos for gateway nodes.
  • Physical network environments include management network, storage network, provision network, IPMI network, and business network. The provision network requires high performance. We recommend that you configure a 10-Gigabit network.
  • To avoid DHCP conflict, make sure that you do not configure an additional DHCP service.
  • You can use a flat network, public network, and VPC network as a business network. If you use a VPC network as a business network, make sure that the NIC name on the L2 network from which the VPC network is created is consistent with the NIC name of the gateway node.
  • You need to install the agent or relevant dependency packages on the elastic baremetal image. Otherwise, some features of elastic baremetal instances cannot work as expected.
  • You can use a Shared Block primary storage and Ceph Enterprise primary storage for elastic baremetal instances. Note that the version of Ceph Enterprise must be later than 4.2.0.300.
  • If you use a Ceph Enterprise primary storage, you need to login to the Ceph Enterprise management node and add the gateway node as the gateway server role. Make sure the required configurations are correct.
  • The following table describes the limits on the primary storage that you can attach to an elastic baremetal cluster.
    Table 1. Relationship of Elastic Baremetal Cluster and Primary Storage
    Primary Storage Elastic Baremetal Cluster
    Ceph You can attach only one Ceph primary storage to an elastic baremetal clusters.
    Shared Block You can attach one or more Shared Block primary storage to an elastic baremetal cluster.
  • You can install mainstream x86 operating systems (OSs) and some ARM OSs on elastic baremetal instances.
    Table 2. Operating Systems
    CPU Architecture OS Type OS
    x86 Windows
    • Windows 2012
    • Windows 2016
    • Windows 2019
    Linux
    • CentOS 7
    • CentOS 8
    • Ubuntu 18LTS
    • Ubuntu 20LTS
    ARM Linux
    • CentOS 7
    • Kylin V10