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Ah – nice to have a good nerdy low-level blog post – have been very busy over the last few weeks :-) Don’t fret – will toggle between the strategic landscape and the lower-level goodies periodically – after all, every blog worth reading is a reflection of the author’s personality – for better or worse! It’s been interesting to see people’s reaction to the RackHD project. RackHD = An open source low level agnostic hardware abstraction and automation layer – from EMC? Yeah. :-) Immediately – the first reaction is “does this displace ____” – where _____ is IPMI, Redfish, Ironic, Razor, the Intel Snap project – and so on. Perhaps. Perhaps not. This is the first post on the ongoing adventures of the RackHD project. See the second one about Cloud Foundry and a “bare metal” BOSH CPI here. Ok – on to the first example… There is an element of the open source ecosystem which is a certain degree of incoherency that tears at our attempts to nicely order and create taxonomies to make everything have a neat place (a universal human desire – we are pattern-seekers by our nature). I’ve had similar dialogs about the relative roles of OpenStack Magnum and you name it container management model (Docker, Photon Controller – etc), which in turn gets conflated with the cluster management ecosystem. From my point of view – the definitions for each of these layers of the strata lack a certain maturity, a certain solidity. That’s OK :-) These are all signs to a wildly turbulent teenager. I’ve been known to be unpredictable, a little hard to classify – but man, compared to what I was when I was 17… There’s also an element of each project where the people behind the origin story (“she was bitten by a radioactive spider…”) have a certain passion for a specific domain, a specific approach – and damn the classification system. In the original RackHD post – I noted how we immediately pivoted some of our core RackHD telemetry development to the Intel project – because what we saw there was cool, and we could build on it. This post is about showting how RackHD can help (vs. displace) something like OpenStack Ironic. Rather than directly (and manually) leveraging IPMI (which in turn imposes a ton of vendor-specific variation) – it simplifies and abstracts. See the demo below. … and more important than talk, you can get the source code for Shovel (“shovels” info into Ironic) here.
RackHD underpins our EMC (including VCE) point of view on low-level hardware management – and were investing and contributing. It’s the core of VxRack’s low level hardware abstraction/automation (with VCE Vision contributing consumption, correlation, context and connection back to the mothership). As we come together with Dell – there’s a lot of interesting IP and expertise there, from low-level hardware management, to their Gale acquisition, and to higher-level orchestration. Will be great to have more tools in the toolbox! As always – thanks for the comments – the input! Would love to see what crazy cool things you do with RackHD! |
