Home > Communication Service Provider Solutions > Telecom Multicloud Foundation > Ironic > Guides > Technical Guide—Managing Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers with the OpenStack Ironic (Wallaby) 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 anywhere else they are located. Ironic is an open-source project within the Open Infrastructure Foundation that provides all bare metal management needs for all platforms and workloads. This document describes how to manage PowerEdge servers with the 23rd release of OpenStack, known as Wallaby.
NOTE: See https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/wallaby/ for more information about the Ironic Wallaby release.
Ironic provides three drivers that can be used to manage PowerEdge servers:
These drivers have differing capabilities. See the Hardware types section for more information.
The Ironic iDRAC driver provides extended capabilities for managing PowerEdge servers beyond those that the generic IPMI and Redfish drivers provide. Dell Technologies develops, maintains, and recommends the iDRAC driver. Details on the usage of the other two drivers is not covered by this document. See the Ironic community documentation for further information about the Redfish and IPMI drivers.
NOTE: See https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/wallaby/admin/drivers/idrac.html for more information about the iDRAC driver.
The OpenStack Marketplace offers a searchable, online directory where you can find drivers that manage PowerEdge servers. You can filter your search by OpenStack project, vendor, and OpenStack release version.
NOTE: See https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/drivers to search for drivers.
Dell Technologies provides two continuous integration (CI) methods:
Dell Technologies provides third-party CI to ensure all changes to Ironic continue to work with PowerEdge servers. Tests cover the three drivers that can be used to manage PowerEdge servers: iDRAC, Redfish, and IPMI.
To view the CI results:
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 to Sushy are validated with PowerEdge servers.
To view the Sushy CI results: