How do I quickly configure CloudBolt to provision to a large set of physical servers?

CloudBolt supports a number of ways to allow builds of physical servers. You can have requesters enter the necessary IPMI information at order time, or save the different available physical servers as Preconfiguration options. However, sometimes you might want to quickly import a large number of identical physical servers to make them available for users to provision to. The way to accomplish this goal is to use a CloudBolt Resource Pool, which supports import of a CSV file. (Note that you should be on 5.3-rc1 or later to complete the process below.)

First, navigate to Admin->CloudBolt Resource Pools.

On the Resource Pools page, click the “Add a resource pool” button to open a new dialog box. In the form, enter a name for the Resource Pool, such as “HP Proliant DL380s”. For the Provides Parameters field, select “IPMI Account”, “IPMI IP”, “IPMI Password”, and “MAC Address”. Use the Environments field to configure where the physical servers in this Resource Pool will be made available, then press “Create”. Note that a Resource Pool can be in multiple Environments, but each Environment can only have one of these Resource Pools for providing physical servers.

Find the newly-created Resource Pool in the list and select it to view the details page. Navigate to its Values tab and click “Upload values in CSV format”.

At this point, you will need to create a CSV file with information on all the physical servers that belong in this Resource Pool, if you have not done so already. An example is attached to this article. The header values in the first line should be “ipmi_account, ipmi_ip, ipmi_password, mac_address”. Every subsequent line provides that data for one physical server.

Once you have a file ready, press the “Browse” button in the Cloudbolt UI to locate and select it. Then click “Upload”.

Look over the values that have been populated in the Resource Pool to confirm they look correct.

Now, when someone orders a server from an Environment associated with this Resource Pool, they will not be asked about the IPMI settings or MAC address in the order form. Instead, it will automatically select the next available physical server in the pool and provision to that.