Razor is a provisioning application that deploys bare-metal systems. Policy-based provisioning lets you use characteristics of the hardware as well as user-provided data to make provisioning decisions. You can automatically discover bare-metal hardware, dynamically configure operating systems and hypervisors, and hand off nodes to PE for workload configuration.
Automated provisioning makes Razor ideal for big installation jobs, like setting up a new selection of servers in a server farm. You can also use Razor to regularly wipe and re-provision test machines.
Note: If you’re using Razor in a brownfield environment, review how to protect existing nodes before you begin.
Provisioning with Razor involves these steps:
The following steps provide a high-level view of the process for provisioning a node with Razor.
When a new node appears, Razor discovers its characteristics by booting it with the Razor microkernel and using Facter to inventory its facts.
The node is tagged based on its characteristics. Tags contain a match condition — a Boolean expression that has access to the node’s facts and determines whether the tag should be applied to the node or not.
Node tags are compared to tags in the policy table. The first policy with tags that match the node’s tags is applied to the node.
The node is now installed. If you choose, you can hand off management of the node to Puppet Enterprise.
The Razor server has been validated on the RHEL/CentOS 6.x and 7.x operating systems.
The Razor client is supported on these operating systems:
To successfully install an operating system on a machine using Razor, the machine must: