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Infrastructure providers are a way to connect compute resources to your Omni instance for automatic management. Providers manage the lifecycle of the machines under their management. This can replace the traditional “manual” management of machines where an engineer is responsible for downloading installation media and booting a machine to connect to Omni. There are two types of infrastructure providers: providers that manage static resources, and providers that manage dynamic resources. Static resources are machines you own that are re-used for different clusters. Dynamic resources are VMs that are created and deleted as needed. Multiple infrastructure providers can be connected to a single Omni instance and be responsible for different sets of machines. The current infrastructure providers are: If you would like to build your own provider or request a provider to be created please join our community slack workspace or open an issue on github.

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Architecture

Each Omni account (or instance) can have multiple providers connected to it. Each infrastructure provider deployment is intended to manage static or dynamic machines (e.g. bare metal, AWS EC2 instances) in a single location (e.g. dc1, us-east-2). Clusters can be created with a mix of infrastructure from manually provisioned, dynamic, or static machines. Infrastructure provider architecture For example, if you have multiple data centers you would run one Bare Metal Infrastructure Provider in each data center with network access to the servers it manages. This would also apply if you have multiple network segments in the same data center. If you want to run multiple providers connected to on-prem VM providers (e.g. VMware, KubeVirt) you would run one provider per VM management API. So even if all providers can reach all platforms they are segmented per provider credential. If you want to run machines in multiple regions or accounts in a public cloud provider you would run one provider to create machines in each region/account. It does not matter where you run the public cloud providers, so long as they can reach the public cloud APIs and your Omni instance.

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Static providers

Static resource providers manage existing bare metal servers in an environment. Static providers differ from dynamic providers in that they do not create machines, but they manage power management, PXE booting, and OS provisioning. When a static machine is not actively being used in a cluster it is turned off to reduce power consumption and heat in a data center. For more information please see the documentation on how to configure a bare metal provider.

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Dynamic providers

Dynamic providers create and destroy machines as needed. These are created using other VM platforms such as AWS, VMware and OpenStack. They can also use other infrastructure management solutions such as Forman or RackN which have their own APIs and can provision machines out of a pool of resources. Dynamic providers make a request to a resource API and expect machines to be created dynamically and connected to Omni. A machine class is automatically created for the request which keeps the machines organized and automatically provisioned to a cluster. Dynamic providers delete machines when they are not being used in a cluster instead of returning them to a pool of static resources.
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