Orchestration Layer provisioning

xCAT ( Extreme Cloud Administration ToolKit )

MaaS ( Metal as a Service) Provisioning 

Metal as a Service brings the language of the cloud to physical servers. It makes it easy to set up the hardware on which to deploy any service that needs to scale up and down dynamically; a cloud being just one example.

It lets you provision your servers dynamically, just like cloud instances – only in this case, they’re whole physical nodes. “Add another node to the Hadoop cluster, and make sure it has at least 16GB RAM” is as easy as asking for it.

With a simple web interface, you can add, commission, update and recycle your servers at will. As your needs change, you can respond rapidly, by adding new nodes and dynamically re-deploying them between services. When the time comes, nodes can be retired for use outside the MAAS.

COBBLER 

Ubuntu uses cobbler as the preferred provisioning server for Ubuntu machines. Cobbler can be used to deploy Ubuntu Server for both, bare-metal machines and Virtual Machines. PXE Booting is the method used to deploy Ubuntu Server in bare-metal. Virtual Machines can be deployed both with PXE booting, and with koan, which is part of cobbler.

AWS ( Amazon Storage Gateway )

Cloud Application Stack 

what is gpxe - now it is iPXE

PXE :
-Preboot eXecution Environment
-The PXE protocol is approximately a combination of DHCP and TFTP, albeit with subtle modifications to both. DHCP is used to locate the appropriate boot server or servers, with TFTP used to download the initial bootstrap program and additional files.
-PXE is proprietary software typically included in most network cards sold today.

gPXE :
-Etherboot/gPXE is very similiar to PXE, except it is an open source project, therefore, the software is free.
-It can be used to enable computers without built-in PXE support to boot from the network, or to extend an existing PXE implementation with support for additional protocols.
-While traditional PXE clients use TFTP to transfer data, gPXE adds the ability to retrieve data through other protocols like HTTP, iSCSI and ATA over Ethernet (AoE), and can work with Wi-Fi rather than requiring a wired connection.

PXE