Incus Integration

MetalSoft integrates with Incus in two ways:

1. As a VM Pool provider (VM Management) Consult Managing a VM Pool for more details for more details
2. As an application via the extensions mechanism Consult MetalSoft extensions for more details

Execution environment

The extension’s Ansible playbooks run on the Site Controller inside an execution environment — a container image that must hold all the dependencies the playbooks need (Galaxy collections, Python modules, CLI tools). The Incus extension repository ships an execution-environment.yml build recipe for such an image; build it with ansible-builder and set it as the Site Controller’s default execution environment (ANSIBLE_RUNNER_EXECUTION_ENV) — the file itself is not read at runtime.

Note on Networking

Note that MetalSoft uses the physical switches as an overlay network instead of OVN. This has the advantage that it allows bare metal nodes to be present on the same private L2 network as the VMs.