= best practices on setting up bare metal servers? =

![ ](httpswww.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/img/renderTimingPixel.png)

Hello

What are the best practices on setting up bare metal servers these days?

I have about 30 servers to set up, and since Ubuntu 20.04 came out recently, I feel this is a good opportunity to update from Ubuntu 16.04 pxe/ks setup, which is no longer used in 20.04.

How are you guys installing the bare metal?

We normally have all bare metals, except the firewall, running the exact same software stack and all services running in docker.

![ ](httpswww.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/img/renderTimingPixel.png)

I would look into MaaS to provide your provisioning. There are some similar option like Digital Rebar. Basically the idea is you want an API-driven inventory of your hardware that can spin up and down the machines between different roles. Once they're up, trigger your configuration management/orchestration to setup your services.

You might also want to consider Kubernetes to improve your container orchestration. There's several bare-metal options like Lokomotive.

note that 20.04 netboot is VERY different than previous releases - preseed is disabled. We (RackN) are working on (re)integrating it in the Digital Rebar (DRP) community. The new process involves cloud-init even for on-prem. It's something that DRP provides via the API. You could play w/ 18.04 to learn until that's hammered out.

I understand the urge to get to latest, but plan time for updates.

Note: Rebar is free to 20 machines and commercial after. The basic tier may be sufficient to you unless you want some of the hardware management or enterprise features. Community in Slack is very active - which is a big benefit.

It's depend of what you need to do on top of the OS MAAS is for OpenStack, using it for anything else is a pain, HP LinuxCOE might be interested as FAI (Full automatic install), RH offer few tools like cobbler, a definitive answer is not provided.

Any vendor offer some kind of LOM (Dell iDrac, HP iLo, IBM RSA) on certain machines, so except entry-level iron you can do remote mass deploy more or less easy depending on the variety of the iron you have.

Software side Preseed/Kickstart are painful, but works, if you can NixOS (NixOps/Disnix) offer an out-of-the-box far easier and effective approach, Guix system also, despite is IMO not really production ready enough (unfortunately).


This only distill the base system, what to deploy and with what tools depend on what you have to do. My favorite combo is NixOS all the way, some script + some vendors LOM and SaltStack for the rest.

What brand of server? Not sur

We use Dell so other brands might be different but I suspect most have similar options.

I setup the idrac first. Grab the Mac address of the idrac and setup a DHCP reservation.

Add it to Open Manage Enterprise push a configuration file out to it via OME. If this is your first time you can manually do one server then export the configuration file for the idrac and bios and then set that up to push to the others.

Then I update the firmware.

Then image your server with your OS. I have never done mass deployments of bare metal with Linux but I would look into terraform. I guess it works with bare metal or maybe Dell OME can do that too.

I only do vsphere now (and i probably will onky ever do one more of these ever again)so I have a script that does the install for me. I just point the server to the script during install.

== About Community ==

Members

Online