Pythonic Bare Metal

You must be familiar with physical machines and virtual machines, each of them have their pros & cons. Virtual machines are very useful for their features such as snapshot, easy maintainance & their plug-&-play properties; however they still have some cons, big one is that its not really physical. Physical machines, on the other hand, are raw hardware bodies, meaning everything is made up of physical components; well, yet there are some cons with physical machines as well such restoration, boot/power control, etc.

Considering pros and cons of physical and virtual machines, a new system can be formed called Bare Metal.

Bare-Metal is a nerwork boot platform wherein selected machines (aka "Initiators" in iSCSI protocol terminology) (with or without local HDD) connect to remote storage using iSCSI protocol & treat the storage as local disks. The enablement of the remote storage happens through what is known as "Target" in iSCSI protocol terminology. These targets can be created & destroyed dynamically, usually with the help of utilities like "tgtadm", "iscsi-targets", etc. Also, these targets can be backed by one or more block-devices (such as LVM LV, RAID, A file, etc.), these block-devices in backing mode are called "Logical Units".

This project utilizes Linux LVMs'Logical volumes as backing devices for targets and TgtAdm for the configurations of targets for network attachment and boot process. Wrappers have been created over lvm2 utility and tgtadm utility to simplify interactions and to expose just the useful functionaliy of the utilities.

Moreover, to simplify configuration related tasks, this platform exposes RESTful API which makes the platform usable to human-beings as well as computers.

Requirements:

For client machines:

1. A PXE boot enabled (with-disk or diskless) machine
2. NIC with 1 gbps bandwidth support [Required]
3. 1 GB of RAM would do but more wil do better
4. Disk [Optional]

For server machines:

1. A good processor with more the cores the better
2. 8GB+ RAM
3. Parellel storage (perhaps, 2 or more HDDs)
4. A good NIC with 1gbps bandwidth support