Manage bare metal like a cloud with Red Hat Bare-Metal-as-a-Service for OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift 4.22 includes general availability support for Red Hat Bare-Metal-as-a-Service (BMaas) for OpenShift, enabling organizations to manage bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), and application containers using the same consistent platform.

What is Red Hat Bare-Metal-as-a-Service for OpenShift?

Before OpenShift 4.22, Cluster Baremetal Operator in OpenShift provided centralized management for servers with Redfish support with containerized and virtualized workloads. With this new add-on, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform now extends its orchestration capabilities to physical hardware running an operating system (OS) only, outside of the traditional virtualization layer. This allows you to manage a fleet of servers with the same efficiency you expect when managing hardware with VMs or containers on top of OpenShift. The CBO is produced by Metal³, an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that provides Kubernetes-native bare metal host management, enrollment, OS provisioning, and lifecycle management of physical servers.

Why bare metal for AI and HPC?

While virtualization offers flexibility, certain high-performance workloads require direct access to physical hardware to eliminate virtualization overhead. This is particularly critical for:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML): Managing a fleet of servers with GPU cards to maximize processing power.
• High-performance computing (HPC): Running intensive computational tasks on a specific OS without performance penalties.

Using BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift, you can deploy an OpenShift cluster that manages servers with an OS-only configuration specifically for these high-demand use cases.

Key capabilities of BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift

BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift is designed to meet several business requirements for modern infrastructure:

• Unified application platform: Manage containers, VMs, and bare metal instances from one location.
• Firmware management: Configure and upgrade firmware, including BIOS and BMC.
• Multi-OS provisioning: Provision bare metal hosts with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (it requires a Red Hat Enterprise Linux SKU), Microsoft Windows, or other operating systems. Note the customer is responsible for providing the OS image.
• Rapid provisioning: Benefit from dynamic provisioning and deprovisioning that mirrors the cloud experience.
• Network configuration: Provision a boot instance.
• Image management: Store, manage, and retrieve various OS images through a centralized repository provided by the customer.

Extending management with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

While BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift handles the initial provisioning, firmware configuration, and hardware lifecycle, you can enhance your environment with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Automation Platform provides optional lifecycle management for the OS and external components like top-of-rack (ToR) switches and routers.

Please note that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform requires a dedicated SKU and is not included in the Red Hat Bare-Metal-as-a-Service for OpenShift SKU.

Architecture overview: BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift

Figure 1 illustrates how the BMaaS for Red Hat Openshift functionality interacts with your hardware and external resources to facilitate automated management. We have noted in the figure the specific OSes that we have tested, but the other listed OSes should work as well; we are not providing an OS image as part of this feature. 

Figure 1. High-level BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift architectural diagram showing centralized management of OS-based workloads via the Cluster Baremetal Operator.

Support and availability

This new functionality is a part of Red Hat OpenShift. If you would like to use it, you need a dedicated subscription (SKU) for bare metal nodes with OS only (OpenShift control plane nodes do not require a SKU). To keep your critical workloads operational, Red Hat offers both Standard and Premium support levels for BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift.

We encourage customers and partners to explore how BMaaS for Red Hat OpenShift can simplify their infrastructure. If you have questions about technical requirements or subscriptions, please contact your Red Hat account team for more information. You can also learn more from the Red OpenShift Container Platform documentation.