OpenStack currently enables the provisioning and operation of applications on cloud VMs, but what if you want to provision onto real hardware instead of VMs? Wouldn't it be nice to use OpenStack for this, too?
Going one step further, what if you could easily use OpenStack itself to orchestrate the deployment and scaling of an OpenStack cloud onto new machine nodes?
At HP Cloud Services, we think that the possibility of a single suite of tools and a unified API for managing both physical and virtual resources is very exciting. Working with others in the community, we have added the "baremetal" compute driver to the Grizzly release of OpenStack to provide a common framework for deploying images to real hardware. We will present the current design of the driver, some limitations it currently has, how to simulate an environment for dev/test purposes, and cover some of the quirks in deploying it. After all, this isn't your average hypervisor.
