Nova now includes a functional baremetal driver with support for PXE-based imaging and IPMI-based power control. This has generated a lot of interest from datacenter operations' teams and many questioning when it will support: hardware discovery, configuration, and BIOS / firmware management; other types of hardware, such as ARM processors and PDU power control; and the possibility to interface with proprietary control modules (iLO / DRAC / etc).
I believe the baremetal driver should provide a means for hardware vendors to easily extend it and take advantage of their control modules, while also providing generic tooling to accomplish these common operational tasks. As the complexity of the baremetal driver grows, its database needs will also grow, and the possible interactions between this "hardware inventory database" and quantum, cinder, healthnmon, etc, will need to be understood.
