Although many workloads are moving to virtual machines, there are circumstances where dedicated physical servers are required. To meet these different requirements, the provider typically manages these services in heterogeneous environments, using Cloud Automation for VMs and provisioning physical servers manually. In this session we share a solution for seamless provisioning and management of physical servers together with virtual machines in a unified OpenStack environment controlled through a single dashboard. The implementation utilizes the existing Nova Compute APIs to provision physical servers as well as the associated storage and networking, thus enabling physical machines to be provisioned and managed using the same methods as VMs. The solution is implemented on AMD's family of SeaMicro Fabric Servers which integrate up to 256 servers, high performance networking, and shared storage in a single 10RU platform. The design challenges, capabilities, and next steps will be shared in this presentation.
