Bare Metal Provisioning — Trivia & Interesting Facts¶
Surprising, historical, and little-known facts about bare metal provisioning.
PXE boot was invented by Intel in 1999¶
The Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) specification was created by Intel in 1999 as part of the "Wired for Management" initiative. Over 25 years later, PXE remains the dominant method for network-booting servers during provisioning, despite being based on TFTP — a protocol with no authentication, no encryption, and a 512-byte block size.
Cobbler was Red Hat's answer to manual kickstart management¶
Cobbler, created by Michael DeHaan (who later created Ansible) at Red Hat around 2006, automated the management of kickstart files, DHCP, DNS, and PXE configurations. It could provision hundreds of servers simultaneously and was one of the first tools to treat bare metal provisioning as a software problem rather than a manual process.
MAAS can provision a server in under 6 minutes¶
Canonical's Metal as a Service (MAAS) can discover, commission, and deploy an operating system to a bare metal server in under 6 minutes. Compare this to the 2000s, when a typical enterprise server provisioning workflow took 2-6 weeks due to procurement, racking, and manual OS installation processes.
IPMI has critical security vulnerabilities that most organizations ignore¶
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), used for out-of-band server management, has well-documented security vulnerabilities including default credentials and unencrypted protocols. A 2013 study by Dan Farmer found that over 230,000 IPMI-enabled servers were exposed to the internet with default passwords.
Facebook open-sourced its entire server provisioning stack¶
In 2019, Facebook (now Meta) open-sourced several components of its bare metal provisioning infrastructure, including its DHCP server implementation. Facebook provisions hundreds of thousands of servers per year and found that commercial provisioning tools couldn't scale to their needs, so they built their own.
Cloud-init works on bare metal too, not just VMs¶
Despite its name suggesting cloud usage, cloud-init can configure bare metal servers just as effectively. Many organizations use cloud-init as a post-provisioning configuration tool on physical hardware, providing the same "first boot" configuration experience whether the target is a VM, container, or physical server.
The Tinkerbell project brought cloud-native provisioning to bare metal¶
Tinkerbell, created by Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) and donated to the CNCF in 2020, uses containers to execute provisioning workflows on bare metal servers. Each provisioning step runs as a container action, bringing GitOps-style declarative management to a domain that was traditionally script-heavy and imperative.
Redfish is finally replacing IPMI after 25 years¶
The Redfish API standard, first released by DMTF in 2015, uses RESTful HTTP/JSON to manage servers — replacing IPMI's binary protocol from the 1990s. Adoption has been slow, and as of 2024, most provisioning tools still support both IPMI and Redfish because many servers in production predate the Redfish specification.
Ironic was named after the Alanis Morissette song¶
OpenStack Ironic, the bare metal provisioning service, was named with irony in mind — it's a cloud orchestration tool for machines that aren't virtualized. The name references the concept that provisioning "bare metal" through a "cloud" API is inherently ironic. It was started by Devananda van der Veen at HP in 2013.
A misconfigured DHCP server can take down an entire network¶
One of the most common bare metal provisioning disasters is a rogue DHCP server handing out IP addresses on a production network. A single misconfigured provisioning DHCP scope can cause IP conflicts, routing failures, and service outages across thousands of machines within minutes. VLAN isolation of provisioning networks exists precisely because of this risk.