Welcome to MetalSoft’s documentation!

MetalSoft is an intelligent bare metal automation software platform for managing datacenters and equipment, from a single rack of servers or tens of thousands across the globe.

In addition, MetalSoft provides a multi-tenant as-a-service platform to enable operators to deliver modern cloud-native applications and containers on bare metal infrastructure. MetalSoft also exposes direct access to the underlying hardware capabilities such as persistent memory, low latency networking, AI & vector processing CPU extensions, GPUs and FPGAs, and smart NICs. At the same time, MetalSoft provides a modern, Infrastructure-as-Code foundation even in high-security on-premises datacenters.

Quickstart:

• Introduction
  • Architecture
  • User interface (a.k.a Infrastructure Editor)
  • Administrative interface (a.k.a. Admin)
• Getting started with MetalSoft
• Using the CLI
  • Installation
  • Getting the API key
  • Getting a list of supported commands
  • Getting started
  • Apply support
  • Condensed format
  • Using label instead of IDs
  • Permissions
  • Admin commands
  • Debugging information

User Guide:

• Managing infrastructures
  • Creating an infrastructure using the UI
  • Creating an infrastructure using the CLI
  • Listing infrastructures using the CLI
  • Changing an infrastructure’s properties using the UI
  • Deleting an infrastructure using the CLI
• Managing instance arrays
  • Deploying an instance array using the Infrastructure Editor
  • Retrieving server access credentials using the UI
  • Deploying an instance array using the CLI
  • Retrieving server access credentials using the CLI
  • Checking the power status of all the instances in this instance array using the CLI
  • Rebooting an instance using the CLI
• Managing drive arrays
  • Creating a drive array using the UI
  • Listing drive arrays of an instance array using the UI
  • Adding a new drive
  • Removing a drive
  • Expanding disk size
  • Creating a drive array using the CLI
  • Listing drive arrays of an infrastructure using the CLI
  • Deleting a drive array via the CLI
  • Manually logging into the iscsi target
• Managing users and permissions
  • User accounts
  • Example scenario
  • The “Billable” account
  • Managing account delegation
  • Managing infrastructure delegation
• Managing networks
  • Creating a LAN network
  • Joining an existing network
  • Adding more IPs
• Retrieving the utilization report
  • The Detailed utilization report
  • Viewing server subscriptions (reservations)
  • Automating chargeback or billing in reselling scenarios
• Creating a custom iSCSI OS template
  • Creating a “golden” drive
  • Creating a a volume template from the golden drive
• Creating a custom local install OS template
  • An example install process
  • Creating a new OS template using the CLI
  • Choosing an architecture
  • Specifying a bootloader and config file
  • Specifying a custom config for iPXE
  • Associating assets with OS Templates
  • Important variables
• Manually managing iSCSI connections
  • Retrieving the drive array’s connection details from the UI
  • Retriving iscsi access credentials using the CLI
  • Logging into the iSCSI target from Linux (CentOS/Redhat)
  • Logging into a drive on Windows using PowerShell
  • Prepare and format disk in Powershell
  • Disconnect from all iscsi targets in Windows using Powershell Or Just disconnect Offline target
  • Disable indexing on a drive in Powershell
• Enabling two factor authentication (2FA) in Metalcloud
• Setting up users and permissions in reseller scenarios
  • Setting up users and permissions in a referral scenario when end-users own the infrastructures
  • Setting up users and permissions in a fully managed reseller scenario
  • Setting up users and permissions in a reseller scenario when end-users have access to infrastructures
• Forcing specific servers at deploy

Admin Guide:

• Deploying Metalsoft
  • Installing the MetalSoft controller
  • Required Hardware
  • Cabling
  • IP Allocation
  • Router configuration
  • Create the datacenter record in MetalSoft
  • Switch configurations
  • Register (enroll) a switch
  • Create a WAN subnet pool
  • Install the Datacenter Agents on the DC agents machine
  • Pre-flight checklist
  • Register (enroll) servers
  • Test a server provisioning
  • Troubleshooting the deployment
• Deploying the MetalSoft controller
  • Install Docker and Docker-compose
  • Prepare your environment
  • Bring the containers up
• Deploying MetalSoft storage appliance
  • Required hardware
  • Configure network
  • Installing zfs and related packages using ansible playbook
  • Enabling zfs services at boot-time
  • Disable RP filter
  • Increase zfs max usable ram space
  • Creating zpool
  • Manually create datasets and set all properties
  • Create saveconfig json file
  • Sync API with the manually created zpool and targetcli config file.
  • Check if BSA API has recognized the newly created zfs pool
  • Create iSCSI target IQN and set it’s IP address
  • Benchmark (if needed)
  • Adding the storage device to application
• Server lifecycle
  • Server states
  • Interact with the server states
  • Server cycles
• Server types
  • Creating a new server type
  • Allocating a server type to a server
• Storage architecture
  • iSCSI storage
  • Local storage
  • Secure erase of data
• Networking overview
  • IP Management (IPAM)
• Adding a new datacenter
• Adding a new server
  • Stage 1: Automatic BMC (IPMI) configuration using DHCP
  • Stage 2: Automatic server registering using auto-discovery
  • Auto-RAID
• Adding a new storage pool
  • Adding a new storage pool
  • Mass deployments
• Managing storage pools
  • Putting a storage pool in maintenance mode
  • Performing an emergency reboot of all connected servers
  • Cleaning up unused templates
• Adding a new subnet pool
  • Creating a OOB subnet pool
• Using the Terraform provider
  • Terraform provider requirements
  • Using the Provider
• Deploying MetalSoft on a flat L2 network
  • Environment configuration
  • Create the datacenter:
  • Create WAN subnets
  • Create a “dummy” switch
  • Install pre-requisites on the datacenter agent machine
  • Login to the docker repository. Username and password are provided by the Metalsoft team
  • Get the datacenter agent URL
  • Configure the datacenter agents
  • Branding support
• Creating a local install template from scratch
• Creating an iSCSI template from scratch
  • Installation with native iSCSI support in the OS installer
  • Installation by mounting the iSCSI LUN using the installer shell
  • A note on the classless static route for SAN
  • Populating the IBFT table
• Re-registering a server
• Managing firmware
  • Upgrading a server’s individual components
  • Performing mass firmware upgrades
• Workflow system overview
  • Our approach
  • Important components
• Managing workflows
  • Workflow execution contexts
• Managing assets
• Managing variables and secrets
  • Referencing variables
  • Referencing secrets
  • Creating a variable from console input
  • Creating a variable using a pipe
  • Creating a secret from user input
  • Creating a secret from pipe
• Enabling Secondary IPs and/or VLANs on the WAN interface
• OS templates runtime variables glossary
  • Infrastructure variables
  • Pre-deploy stage variables
  • Post-deploy stage variables
  • Instance Array variables
  • Instance variables
  • Drive Array variables
  • Shared Drives
  • SNMP variables
  • Datacenter variables
  • General purpose variables
• Managing stage definitions
  • Creating a new stage definition
  • HTTP Request stages
  • Ansible Bundle stages
  • WorkflowReference stages
  • Listing stages
• Managing OS templates
  • An example install process
  • Creating a new OS template using the CLI
  • Choosing an architecture
  • Specifying a bootloader and config file
  • Specifying a custom config for iPXE
  • Associating assets with OS Templates
  • Important variables
• Using infrastructures with workflows
  • Attaching workflows
  • Empty infrastructures
  • Attaching a workflow to a instance array
  • Specifying certain server IDs
• vSphere workflow example
  • Creating assets
  • Configuring an instance array to install ESXI
  • Creating a stage definition for enroll into vCenter
  • Create a workflow
  • Add stages to workflow
  • Verify the stages
  • Add workflow to infrastructure
  • Deploy infrastructure
• Deployment task queue (AFC)
  • The AFC Graph
  • Troubleshooting failed operations
• Configuring configuration for SSL enabled repository access
• Enabling traffic accounting
  • Redundancy, scalability and accuracy
• Troubleshooting guide
• Release notes
  • R4.8 - 03 March 2021
  • System check
  • Secondary IPs support
  • VLAN override support
  • Cisco ACI support - beta
  • Job Queue section
  • Deploy graph section
  • Improvements to the Infrastructures section
  • Improvements to the used register mechanisms
  • Improvements to Auto-RAID support
  • Adding a new method of registering a server
  • Fixed some cleanup and registration issues with Supermicro servers
  • Improvements to the servers page

Additional resources

• Terraform Provider
• CLI
• GO SDK
• User API Documentation
• Extended API Documentation
• Additional SDKs