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:
User Guide:
- Managing infrastructures
- 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
- Managing networks
- Retrieving the utilization report
- Creating a custom iSCSI OS template
- Creating a custom local install OS template
- 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
- Forcing specific servers at deploy
Admin Guide:
- Deploying Metalsoft
- Installing the MetalSoft controller
- Required Hardware
- Cabling
- IP Allocation
- Router configuration
- Create the datacenter MASTER 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
- Deploying the MetalSoft agent
- 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 types
- Storage architecture
- Networking overview
- IP address Management (IPAM)
- How does it work?
- When are subnets freed?
- WAN Gateways
- Adding a new datacenter
- Adding a new server
- Adding a new storage pool
- Managing storage pools
- Adding a new subnet pool
- Adding a new external connection
- Adding a new network profile
- Retrieving my API key
- Using the Terraform 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
- Re-registering a server
- Managing firmware
- Workflow system overview
- Managing workflows
- Managing assets
- Managing variables and secrets
- Enabling Secondary IPs and/or VLANs on the WAN interface
- Configuring the secondary interface in the kickstart file of the template
- OS templates runtime variables glossary
- Managing stage definitions
- Managing OS templates
- Using infrastructures with workflows
- vSphere workflow example
- Deployment task queue (AFC)
- Configuring configuration for SSL enabled repository access
- Enabling traffic accounting
- Troubleshooting guide