The Dell Technologies Bare Metal Orchestrator software is provided as an installation bundle and is based on Kubernetes. You can deploy Bare Metal Orchestrator on physical servers or virtual hypervisors as a single node cluster or a five-node high availability (HA) cluster with internal distributed storage. Ubuntu 20.04 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 operating systems are supported.
Bare Metal Orchestrator installs an RKE2 (next-generation) cluster called the Global Controller (GC) node, which is also called control plane 1 (CP1).
The Global Controller is a fully contained management cluster with onboard services and components that function as a site. This cluster is also called the GC site. The GC site simplifies the administration and management of Bare Metal Orchestrator and is the default site that is created during deployment.
The following figure shows the architecture of a single node Bare Metal Orchestrator cluster with a Global Controller node. But for real-world deployments, we recommend installing a fully HA Bare Metal Orchestrator cluster.
For high availability (HA), the RKE2 cluster includes a Global Controller (CP1) node, two redundant HA nodes (CP2 and CP3) for failover, and two redundant Load Balancers. For details, see Bare Metal Orchestrator high availability.
After a successful Bare Metal Orchestrator installation, you can add sites and worker nodes to the Global Controller node. Worker nodes support the creation of remote sites. For more information about sites, see the Bare Metal Orchestrator Command Line Interface User's Guide.
When you install Bare Metal Orchestrator, a unique ID is assigned to the cluster. All logs and events that are associated with the Bare Metal Orchestrator cluster reference this unique cluster ID. If you are monitoring multiple Bare Metal Orchestrator clusters, you can track which logs and events belong to each cluster using their unique cluster ID. For high availability (HA), the cluster ID is assigned to the Global Controller node (CP1) and is maintained during failover scenarios.