Bare Metal (PC Farm)
While the majority of DaDesktop operations rely on virtual environments, certain tasks require direct access to physical hardware. The bare metal solution ensures that each participant is allocated their own dedicated physical desktop or server, all centrally administered through the DaDesktop platform.
Exclusive Physical Hardware
Participants gain access to dedicated physical machines, bypassing the constraints of virtual desktop infrastructure.
Remote Classroom Management
Integrate existing physical classrooms with DaDesktop to oversee and control hardware assets without the need for on-site presence.
Situations Requiring Bare Metal Access
- Applications that are incompatible with virtualization, such as ONAP and OpenStack.
- Specific hardware components that cannot be virtualized, including particular GPUs, Mellanox adapters, and specialized network equipment.
- Training curricula that mandate interaction with firmware or tangible hardware components.
- On-premise classroom configurations that require centralized, remote administration.
Operational Mechanism
Each physical device establishes a connection to a DaDesktop node via a control interface known as ddnexus. When provisioning a standalone or fresh-start environment, selecting the "Metal PC" option triggers the direct deployment of the desktop image onto the physical hardware.
PC Farm Architecture
Existing office desktops can be integrated into the infrastructure to function as bare metal nodes. Within this ecosystem, each individual physical desktop is referred to as a potato. The central server responsible for orchestration is designated as a pumpkin (also known as the DaDesktop node or ddnode). The USB cabling used to link each potato to the pumpkin is termed a potato stalk.
These Potato Stalk cables can be sourced from retailers like eBay and Alibaba.
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