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On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 8:22 AM Zhipeng Huang <zhipengh512 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm also very interested in the use case here, for accelerators deployed
> at edge it would be needed to have zero touch provision capability as Jay
> described.
>

Accelerators...interesting. I would be happy to hear more about that use
case.


>
> I'm wondering if the open firmware project [0] could be of help here by
> any means ? I saw there was a FB presentation that they use it for
> provisioning automation in their datacenter at the OCP Regional Summit.
>
> [0] https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_System_Firmware
>

Quite possibly, or perhaps ONIE as well, or a combination. :)

Mostly I was wondering if there had been any discussion in the edge group,
or if anyone knows of any major activities around this area.  I think a
zero touch related group was just recently started at ETSI [1] but haven't
read through related docs yet.

Thanks,
Curtis

[1]:
https://www.etsi.org/index.php/technologies-clusters/technologies/zero-touch-network-service-management


>
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 9:09 PM Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/20/2018 07:12 AM, Curtis wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I've been looking through the docs I can find related to the edge
>> > working group, and I'm wondering if there has been any
>> > discussion/documentation of a Zero Touch Provisioning use case. I can't
>> > seem to find anything, but I may not be looking in the right place.
>> Just
>> > wanted to double check and see what the current state is, if any.
>>
>> I take it that by "zero touch *provisioning*" (emphasis added to
>> differentiate from zero *configuration* networking, you are referring to
>> the ability for a new server to be rack-and-stacked in a site, powered
>> on, and immediately register itself with either a local inventory
>> management system or a remote one?
>>
>> In either case, the issue I foresee is that the firmware (or initial
>> boot/ramdisk that comes from the factory or supply chain team) will need
>> to have some program installed in it that sends out a request looking
>> for some known/assumed inventory management service [1]. The thing that
>> *responds* to such a request would, of course, need to be already
>> installed and available either on a switch or a pre-installed machine
>> pingable on the out-of-band network and already configured by the team
>> that handles hardware inventory.
>>
>> I can see some vendors working on their own custom low-touch
>> provisioning software -- and this software would likely end up depending
>> on their own proprietary (or subscription-based) server software ala Red
>> Hat's Satellite software [2]). But getting all the vendors to come
>> together on a unified low-touch provisioning system? Chances are pretty
>> slim, IMHO.
>>
>> Still, it's an interesting problem domain and I'd be interested in
>> sharing thoughts and discussing it with others. Here at
>> "Yahoo!/Oath/Verizon Media Group/Whatever we'll be called next month" we
>> have custom software (and a bit of custom hardware!) that handles base
>> hardware provisioning and I'm definitely interested in seeing if other
>> shops that handle hundreds of thousands of baremetal machines are
>> looking to collaborate in this area ("edge" or otherwise!).
>>
>> Best,
>> -jay
>>
>> [1] this could be done via some custom DHCPDISCOVER/DHCPREQUEST bits I
>> suppose -- which would require a DHCP client in the firmware/bootdisk --
>> but more likely would depend on the IPMI/BMC system in use for the
>> hardware. As soon as IPMI/BMC comes into play, the extreme differences
>> in OEM vendor support will rule out a generic workable solution here as
>> many in the Ironic community will likely attest to [3]. If you can rely
>> on a homogeneous set of hardware at edge sites, you might be able to put
>> something together that just suits your company's need, however.
>>
>> [2] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite
>>
>> [3] https://github.com/openstack/ironic/tree/master/ironic/drivers
>>
>>
>
> --
> Zhipeng (Howard) Huang
>
> Principle Engineer
> IT Standard & Patent/IT Product Line
> Huawei Technologies Co,. Ltd
> Email: huangzhipeng at huawei.com
> Office: Huawei Industrial Base, Longgang, Shenzhen
>
>

-- 
Blog: serverascode.com
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