Hardware profiles are deployment templates that contain configuration settings. You can apply these configuration profiles to multiple servers for rapid and reproducible configuration.
Bare Metal Orchestrator provides the flexibility to create hardware profiles with different specifications and to apply them to one or multiple servers.
Hardware profiles enable you to:
- Perform bulk provisioning.
- Manage multiple servers in a consistent manner.
- Automate repetitive administrative tasks.
In Bare Metal Orchestrator, hardware profiles are YAML files that you create and populate with attributes that trigger specific workflows, such as firmware updates, operating system deployment, and so forth.
To apply a hardware profile to specific servers, you can either list the names of the servers to target directly in the hardware profile or use selectors and labels.
Selectors and labels are user defined. The selector attribute you add to the hardware profile targets servers that have a matching label attribute.
selectors:
hwprofile: hw-profile001
The hardware profile is applied to any server that has a matching hwprofile label configured with the matching value. For example:
labels:
hwprofile: hw-profile001
Hardware profiles also support a preview attribute so you can see the status of targeted servers before the hardware profile is applied, see Preview server configuration status.
You can use the sample hardware profile .yaml files provided during deployment to create new hardware profiles and deploy specific profile configurations on servers. For more information about the supported configurations, see Managing server configurations.
For more information about targeting servers and limitations, see Hardware profile targeting.