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Baremetal Provider Setup

Purpose: For platform engineers, shows how to configure the baremetal provider when the hardware and operating system are already provisioned.

Scope​

Baremetal is a GA provider for pre-provisioned Linux hosts. openCenter does not provision hardware, PXE workflows, firmware, switches, or operating-system images for you.

Prerequisites​

  • Three or more Linux control-plane hosts for production HA
  • One or more Linux worker hosts
  • Stable hostnames and static IPs for every node
  • SSH reachability from the bastion host to every node
  • DNS and NTP configured for the target environment
  • openCenter CLI installed

Initialize the Cluster​

opencenter cluster init prod-baremetal --org my-org --type baremetal

Configure the Hosts​

Edit the generated cluster config:

opencenter cluster edit prod-baremetal

Populate the provider and static node inventory:

opencenter:
  infrastructure:
    provider: baremetal
    bastion:
      address: bastion.example.com

  cluster:
    kubernetes:
      master_count: 3
      worker_count: 2
      master_nodes:
        - id: cp-1
          name: cp-1.example.com
          access_ip_v4: 192.168.10.11
        - id: cp-2
          name: cp-2.example.com
          access_ip_v4: 192.168.10.12
        - id: cp-3
          name: cp-3.example.com
          access_ip_v4: 192.168.10.13
      worker_nodes:
        - id: worker-1
          name: worker-1.example.com
          access_ip_v4: 192.168.10.21
        - id: worker-2
          name: worker-2.example.com
          access_ip_v4: 192.168.10.22

Validate and Render​

opencenter cluster validate prod-baremetal
opencenter cluster setup prod-baremetal --render

The rendered output gives you the Kubespray inventory and GitOps repository content for the cluster. There is no Terraform infrastructure-provisioning phase for baremetal.

Operational Notes​

  • Host lifecycle stays with your infrastructure team.
  • opencenter cluster drift does not register a baremetal infrastructure backend.
  • Platform services still deploy through the normal GitOps bootstrap flow once the cluster is up.

Verification​

opencenter cluster status
kubectl get nodes -o wide

All control-plane and worker hosts should appear with the expected names and IP addresses from the configuration file.