The use of Bare Metal to run containerized workload is coming back into popularity. There are multiple reasons for this increase of interest. First, the rise of big data analytics, high performance computing, machine learning workloads that need high-bandwidth and low latency and sometimes even requires access to special hardware devices like GPUs or DPUs. And at the same time, in the telecommunication space, the 5G networks technology stacks that drive the need for IPv6, SR-IOV, Container Network Functions (CNFs), NUMA topologies, and other innovations in containerized applications on bare metal.

All of these emphasize the need for the ability to easily create Bare Metal based OpenShift clusters as automatically as possible.

Central Infrastructure Management (CIM) exposes an intuitive user interface, allowing the infrastructure administrator to define a pool of Bare Metal machines making them available for users to independently create OpenShift clusters from them.

Assisted Installer is an operator that introduces a new way to deploy a new OpenShift cluster on bare metal basically by only booting the nodes that will be part of the cluster, with an ISO it generates. The Assisted Installer will report inventory, run validations and orchestrate the needed steps based on the user parameters.

CIM and Assisted Installer are components of Open Cluster Management (OCM), an operator that enables a single OCP cluster to manage a fleet of clusters.

In this session, you will learn about Central Infrastructure Management and Assisted Installer architecture and its components. We will discuss the installation flow and how the components interact with each other. Finally, we will demonstrate how to build a pool of Bare Metal and install an OpenShift cluster on them via the CIM user interface.