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(1) Physical NIC

(1)PhysicalNICIPMI(2)PhysicalServerPXE(3)VirtualContainerKubernetes(4)VirtualVMOpenStack(1)PhysicalNIC

Interface​

IPMI is a physical management interface software on a NIC. It defined as a standard and widely applied across most hardware vendors. There variations and addons available as certain vendors have slightly different implementations (HP iLO, redfish, etc.). However they are typically compatible with lower level IPMI commands.

The interface itself allows to perform typical operations on physical servers without the need to be physically present at the server. Instead, the operations can performed over an IP network. The commands include

  • Power up
  • Power down
  • Reset
  • Selecting a bootdevice
  • Accessing the bios/efi
  • Serial Over Lan

COTB Implementation​

The IPMI interface enables the operation of its upper layer, the [(2) Physical Server][layer2.md]. The key aspect here is the configuration of the next boot device, which is set to PXE.

Moreover, any IPMI specific settings are part of the inventory

The actual IPMI operations are performed by our IPMI tool, which is further described in tools/ipmi