Skip to content

Environments

DRP can manage machines in a wide range of compute environments — from physical bare metal servers to virtual machines and public cloud instances. This section contains environment-specific guidance for setting up the infrastructure that DRP will manage. Each environment type has different networking requirements, discovery mechanisms, and boot considerations.

Bare Metal

Bare metal is the primary use case for DRP. Physical servers boot via PXE or iPXE, are discovered by the DRP DHCP/TFTP service, and are provisioned through boot environments (BootEnvs). Key considerations for bare metal:

  • DRP's DHCP service must be reachable on the provisioning network (or a DHCP proxy/relay must forward requests to DRP).
  • TFTP and HTTP file serving must be accessible from the machines being provisioned.
  • Out-of-band management (IPMI/BMC) integration is available for power control and console access.

Virtual Machines

Virtual machines running on KVM, VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, or VirtualBox can be provisioned by DRP using the same PXE-based workflow as physical servers, provided the hypervisor is configured to serve DHCP from DRP or relay DHCP requests to it. Each hypervisor section covers the specific network and boot configuration needed.

For KVM, DRP can manage VMs created with libvirt. For ESXi, PXE boot must be enabled on the VM network adapter. Hyper-V requires Generation 1 VMs or specific Generation 2 secure boot configuration for PXE.

Cloud Environments

Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, Linode) do not use PXE booting. DRP manages cloud instances through:

  • Cloud-init integration — DRP renders cloud-init configuration and serves it via its file API.
  • Instance provisioning workflows — DRP pipelines create and configure cloud instances using provider APIs, then manage post-boot configuration through the DRP agent.
  • Provider plugins — Some cloud environments have dedicated DRP plugins for instance lifecycle management (creation, power control, teardown).

Network connectivity between the cloud instance and the DRP endpoint must be established before DRP can manage it. This typically means either placing DRP in the same VPC/VNet, or using a VPN or tunneling solution.

Environment-Specific Pages

The sub-pages in this section cover the following environments:

  • AWS — EC2 instance provisioning and DRP agent configuration.
  • Azure — Azure VM provisioning considerations.
  • ESXi — VMware ESXi VM creation and PXE configuration.
  • Hyper-V — Hyper-V VM boot configuration for DRP provisioning.
  • KVM — Libvirt/KVM setup for DRP-managed VMs.
  • VirtualBox — VirtualBox network configuration for local lab environments.
  • DigitalOcean, Linode, Packet — Cloud and bare-metal-as-a-service provider configurations.