Home > Communication Service Provider Solutions > Telecom Multicloud Foundation > Ironic > Guides > Technical Guide—Managing Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers with the OpenStack Ironic (Xena) iDRAC Driver > Executive summary
Operators must manage their bare-metal server hardware as it is brought into their environments—cloud, data center, edge, far edge, and any other location. Ironic is an open-source project within the Open Infrastructure Foundation that provides all bare-metal management needs for all platforms and workloads. This guide describes how to manage Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with the 24th release of OpenStack Ironic, known as Xena.
For more information about the Ironic Xena release, see Welcome to Ironic’s documentation!
Ironic provides three drivers that can be used to manage PowerEdge servers:
These drivers have different capabilities, as described in Hardware types.
The Ironic iDRAC driver provides capabilities for managing PowerEdge servers that are beyond the capabilities that the generic IPMI and Redfish drivers provide. Dell Technologies develops, maintains, and recommends the Ironic iDRAC driver. For more information, see the OpenStack Ironic documentation: iDRAC driver.
The OpenStack Marketplace offers a searchable, online directory where you can find drivers that manage PowerEdge servers. Search for drivers in the OpenStack Drivers section. You can filter your search by project, vendor, and release version.
Dell Technologies provides two continuous integration (CI) test environments:
This section describes how to view the CI test results for these environments.
Dell Technologies provides third-party CI to ensure that all changes that are made to Ironic continue to work with PowerEdge servers. CI tests are performed to validate that the following three drivers can be used to manage PowerEdge servers: iDRAC, Redfish, and IPMI.
To view the Dell Technologies Ironic third-party CI test results:
The details of that change are displayed on a new page.
Sushy is the Redfish library that the Ironic Redfish and iDRAC drivers use to communicate with the iDRAC using the Redfish protocol. Dell Technologies provides third-party CI to ensure that changes that are made to Sushy are validated with PowerEdge servers.
To view the Dell Technologies Sushy third-party CI test results:
The details of that change are displayed on a new page.
This guide describes how to manage bare-metal PowerEdge servers using the Xena release of OpenStack Ironic and the iDRAC driver. For information about using the Redfish and IPMI drivers, see the Ironic community documentation. Information about using the Redfish and IPMI drivers is outside the scope of this document.
Note: The terms “driver” and “hardware type” are used interchangeably throughout this document.