Hardware Support

In order to keep the automation and maintenance overhead small, we strongly advise against building highly heterogeneous environments with metal-stack. Having a lot of different vendors and server models in your partitions will heavily increase the time and effort for introducing metal-stack in your infrastructure. From experience we can tell that the interfaces for automating hardware provisioning are usually inconsistent between vendors and even between server models of the same vendor. Therefore, we encourage adopters to start off with only a small amount of machine types. If you want to be on the safe side, you should consider buying the hardware that we officially support.

We came up with a repository called go-hal, which includes the interface required for metal-stack to support a machine vendor. If you plan to implement support for new vendors, please check out this repository and contribute back your efforts in order to make the community benefit from extended vendor support as well.

Servers

The following server types are officially supported and verified by the metal-stack project:

Other server series and models might work but were not reported to us.

GPUs

The following GPU types are officially supported and verified by the metal-stack project:

Other GPU models might work but were not reported to us. For a detailed description howto use GPU support in a kubernetes cluster please check this documentation

Network Cards

The following network cards are officially supported and verified by the metal-stack project for usage in servers:

Switches

The following switch types are officially supported and verified by the metal-stack project:

Other switch series and models might work but were not reported to us.

Portable metal-stack Setup

A minimal physical hardware setup may contain at least the following components:

This setup will yield in 8 usable machines, one of them can be configured to provide persistent CSI storage.