RFC: Rename Bare Metal in Deploy on menu

Development RFCs
1

We are using “Bare Metal” menu entry in the Deploy on drop down on New Host form as far as I remember - forever? It does not fully represent what Foreman is capable, because this selection can provision several things:

  • bare-metal server via PXE
  • VM server via PXE

There are also new technologies available which we hopefully adopt soon, HTTPS UEFI BOOT to name one. Therefore I suggest to rename this menu item. Here are some options:

  • Network boot
  • Network host
  • Boot from network
  • Boot from PXE
  • Netboot
  • PXE boot
  • PXE host
  • Other (drop a comment)

0 voters

https://projects.theforeman.org/issues/24009

2

I do not think PXE* is a good idea, because i think you can also use the bootdisk plugin to deploy on bare metal.

3

I agree that PXE is not good and net* is better. I voted netboot but Network boot sounds just as good.

4

All of these options refer to a method of deployment, not a target. Given all the other options in that combo-box are targets, it’s going to look weird:

Deploy on:
* Netboot
* MyHost (Libvirt)
* MyAWS (EC2)
* MyVMWare (VMWare)

3 of those 4 entries are “Netboot capable”, so what information is “Netboot” telling me? It’s true that we can PXEboot a VM, but that comes from another entry, so I don’t see the need to rename it?

I could see an argument for clarifying the target, e.g. “Physical Host” instead of “Bare Metal”, but switching to a method involves changing all the Compute Resources as well, for consistency.

Thus I’d vote “Don’t change it” but you forgot to include the status quo as an option - oh and auto-closing in 2 days is unreasonably short.

5

Side note - yes it’s possible to treat a libvirt host as “bare metal” in some sense, and we do that a lot in development and demo setups, but it’s not really the way it’s meant to be used. If you’re using libvirt in production, I’d expect Foreman to be hooked up to the hypervisor

6

Should it be Deploy using instead of Deploy on?

7

I think that would be a larger change. If I can select “Deploy with” “Netboot” then I might reasonably expect to get a further choice of Netboot-capable systems.

I’m not against such a change, for the record. We have had discussions about redesigns of the Host page before. I’m just noting it’s larger than a simple rename :slight_smile:

8

Good points, everytime I try to edit the poll adding “* Don’t change it” entry I got an error. Can you try and add this for me? Also remove the poll close, it’s too tight.

Anyway the wording is not good, you are right. This would be a change for worse. We already have “provisioning method” term. That could be confusing.

Looks like status-que is the only reasonable option here.

9

Polls can’t be edited because it invalidates the previous responses. If we’re sticking with status-quo then just close it, otherwise post a new one down here in the replies :slight_smile:

10

Sorry folks, I closed the poll and the RM issue. It looks like the current term is not bad at all :slight_smile:

Naming things is hard.

2 Likes
11

There are many users who kicks the provisioning process outside of Foreman so they use bare metal for e.g. vmware vms. I think calling it bare metal makes this feel as a hack, while it sounds as a legitimate use case to me.

12

So, what we really want to say is: “a host whose hardware is not managed by foreman”. I have really no idea how to formulate this in short.

13

Even that isn’t necessarily true. We can handle BMC stuff, so we can even manage the hardware of physical hosts :slight_smile:

@Marek_Hulan fair point, but I don’t really have any better suggestions. I stand by my point that it needs to be named after a target rather than a method (unless we do a larger rework). With that constraint, I’m struggling to come up with a better 2-word phrase.

14

Is or should this bmc stuff then not be handled by it’s own compute resource?

15

Bare metal doesn’t have a compute resource, so unless we added one I don’t see how that can be generalised in the UI. Bare metal gets a lot of special treatment in the UI, so this comes up a lot. We could consider adding one, but I’m not sure if it’s a big win (I think this came up a few years ago, and we came to the same conclusion then too).

1 Like