Hardware Management and Orchestration
RackHD overview

RackHD provides free, open source development tools and APIs that developers can use to automate hardware management and orchestration. It serves as an abstraction layer between other management layers and the underlying, vendor-specific physical hardware.

Developers can use the RackHD APIs to incorporate RackHD functionality into a larger orchestration system, or to create a user interface for managing hardware services regardless of the underlying hardware.

RackHD features


Discovery and cataloging

Discovers the compute, network, and storage resources and catalogs their attributes and capabilities.

Telemetry and genealogy

Obtain telemetry data that includes genealogical details.

Provisioning

Provisions a node to support the application workflow.

Configuration

Configures the hardware for application requirements, from the BIOS configuration on the compute device to the port configuration for a network switch.

Device management

Powers devices on and off, and manage the firmware, power, OS installation, and base configuration of the resources.

Firmware management

Manages all infrastructure firmware versioning, including configuration and firmware update.

Logging

Retrieve log information for a particular element or for multiple elements collated into a single timeline.

Environmental monitoring

Aggregates environmental data from hardware resources.

Data analytics

(Vision) Provide the data that is generated by environmental and fault monitoring can be provided to analytic tools for analysis, particularly around predictive failure

Fault detection

(Vision) Monitors compute and storage devices for both hard faults and soft faults, and perform suitable responses based on pre-defined policies.

You define RackHD

Contribute your ideas for new and revised features, refer to link for more..

RackHD use cases

RackHD can effectively deliver hardware management and orchestration at every lifecycle stage.

D A Y 0

Bare metal provisioning

  • - Discover and catalog servers and switches.
  • - Update firmware (BIOS, BMC, NIC, RAID, etc.)
  • - Configure BIOS and BMC settings.
  • - Configure RAID
  • - Install OS images, hypervisors, applications, etc.
  • D A Y 1

    Rack and stack

  • - Discover and build logical topology of servers and switch ports.
  • - Customer specific BIOS, BMC, RAID configuration settings.
  • - Update firmware, OS images, hypervisors to meet customer configuration.
  • D A Y 2

    Lifecycle management

  • - System Expansion.
  • - FRU replacements.
  • - Update firmware, OS images, and hypervisors to meet customer configuration.
  • - Basic server and switch health monitoring.
  • User testimonials

    Hear success stories straight from community

    "RackHD's workflow engine provides a unique advantage not seen in other solutions. Workflows allow us to string together tasks like hardware testing, bios configuration, firmware upgrades, and post install OS customization."

    - John Hogenmiller (@ytjohn), Virtustream

    "When we tried to enable customer's datacenter towards the Cloud Native phase, most of them mentioned about how to do bare-metal management and orchestration in that particular scenario. We see a great fit of Docker + RackHD into this request, and this combination brings more value beyond that. The beautiful part of this solution is to decouple the hardware platform with the management capability, which gives more possibilities from our perspective."

    - Roby Chen, DaoCloud

    "RackHD is fast becoming a critical component of our multi-cloud strategy, allowing us to effortlessly discover & API-manage bare-metal resources in our data centers. This has allowed us to extend our microservice platform "universal installer" to include the data center as a first-class citizen – a critical move for controlling costs and increasing performance for certain workloads."

    - Timothy Gelter, Lead Cloud Engineer, Adobe

    RackHD documentation