I've read a bit about bare-metal support in openstack.  It looks like Nova has 
decent support for it, with a few bugs, and Ironic's still in development[1].

We at Mozilla have a bit of an unusual use-case, and I'm wondering how 
practical it will be to add support for it.  I'm sure there will be a decent 
amount of coding involved, and if those can be distributed as distinct plugins 
or upstreamed to OpenStack, all the better!

The case is this: we have a bunch of typical commodity servers, a bunch of Mac 
Minis, and a bunch of development boards (Pandaboards, in particular).  We have 
tools in place for doing manual provisioning: IPMI for server power and 
IP-addressable power supplies for the Minis and Pandaboards, along with MDT for 
Windows, Kickstart for Linux (both PXE), Casper for OS X (Netboot), and a 
PXE-based custom solution for development boards[2].  Our DNS, DHCP, and 
network configuration is built from our internal inventory app[3], and wouldn't 
be handled directly by Nova.  We'd like to dynamically provision OS's onto all 
of this hardware, with the servers getting either Linux and Windows, the Minis 
getting various flavors of OS X, and the development boards getting various 
flavors of Android and Firefox OS.

My hope is that we could add plugins that would glue OpenStack to some of the 
tools we're already using.  Is that practical?  Totally impractical?  Am I 
taking the wrong approach?  Will I be able to support all of these various 
backends in a single OpenStack instance?

TIA,
Dustin

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/Mozpool
[3] https://github.com/mozilla/inventory

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