It’s hard to get excited about re-implementing functionality from v1 unless the v2 happens to also be freaking awesome.   It’s awesome because the OpenCrowbar architecture allows us to it “the right way” with real out-of-band controls against the open WSMAN APIs.

With out-of-band control, we can easily turn systems on and off using OpenCrowbar orchestration.  This means that it’s now standard practice to power off nodes after discovery & inventory until they are ready for OS installation.  This is especially interesting because many servers RAID and BIOS can be configured out-of-band without powering on at all.

Frankly, Crowbar 1 (cutting edge in 2011) was a bit hacky.  All of the WSMAN control was done in-band but looped through a gateway on the admin server so we could access the out-of-band API.  We also used the vendor (Dell) tools instead of open API sets.

That means that OpenCrowbar hardware configuration is truly multi-vendor.  I’ve got Dell & SuperMicro servers booting and out-of-band managed.  Want more vendors?  I’ll give you my shipping address.

OpenCrowbar does this out of the box and in the open so that everyone can participate.  That’s how we solve this problem as an industry and start to cope with hardware snowflaking.

And this out-of-band management gets even more interesting…

Since we’re talking to servers out-of-band (without the server being “on”) we can configure systems before they are even booted for provisioning.  Since OpenCrowbar does not require a discovery boot, you could pre-populate all your configurations via the API and have the Disk and BIOS settings ready before they are even booted (for models like the Dell iDRAC where the BMCs start immediately on power connect).

Those are my favorite features, but there’s more to love:

• the new design does not require network gateway (v1 did) between admin and bmc networks (which was a security issue)
• the configuration will detect and preserves existing assigned IPs.  This is a big deal in lab configurations where you are reusing the same machines and have scripted remote consoles.
• OpenCrowbar offers an API to turn machines on/off using the out-of-band BMC network.
• The system detects if nodes have IPMI (VMs & containers do not) and skip configuration BUT still manage to have power control using SSH (and could use VM APIs in the future)
• Of course, we automatically setup BMC network based on your desired configuration