Machine Lifecycle¶

The Machine Lifecycle describes how Digital Rebar Provision discovers, inventories, and provisions individual machines from initial contact through a fully deployed state.

A machine in DRP progresses through distinct phases:

1. Discovery — The machine is found and identified by DRP, either through PXE boot, IPMI scan, manual join-up, or cloud API
2. Inventory & Classification — Sledgehammer collects hardware details; the classify stage determines what the machine is and sets the machine's Machine.Pipeline accordingly
3. OS Deployment — Hardware is configured, an operating system is installed, and applications are provisioned

The pipeline assigned during classification drives the machine through its phases. When a machine is built by a workflow-mode WorkOrder, that WorkOrder carries the pipeline run and records each phase it traverses; a machine's Machine.PendingWorkOrders reflects pipeline work queued against it. See Provisioning Pipeline for how pipelines and Work Order modes execute this progression.

In This Section¶

• Discovery — How machines are added to DRP: PXE boot, IPMI scan, join-up, and cloud creation
  • Sledgehammer — The in-memory discovery OS
  • PXE Boot — DHCP, TFTP, and boot process
  • IPMI Scan — Out-of-band discovery
  • Join Up — Agent-based registration for running systems
  • Cloud Create — Cloud-provider machine creation
• OS & Application Deployment — Hardware profiles, OS installation methods, and application deployment patterns
  • Hardware Management — BIOS, RAID, firmware, IPMI configuration
  • OS Installation — Image deploy, kickstart/preseed, Eikon, ESXi
  • Application Deployment — OpenShift and runbook patterns

See Also¶

• Cluster Lifecycle — Coordinating groups of machines
• Provisioning Pipeline — The workflow engine that drives machines through this lifecycle
• Operator Guide: Machine Operations