With vMetal we took a different approach: treat physical machines like programmable infrastructure resources. Compared to tools like MAAS or Tinkerbell, vMetal is designed around a few ideas: - Bare metal lifecycle automation: Automatically discover machines on the network, boot them, install OS images, and reprovision nodes as hardware moves between clusters or workloads. Built on Metal3 and Ironic. -Built for GPU cluster ops: Supports environments where nodes frequently move between clusters, capacity pools, or tenant workloads. -Direct Kubernetes integration: Provisioned machines can be attached directly to Kubernetes clusters as nodes or assigned to infrastructure pools. -Works with Kubernetes multi-tenancy layers: Integrates with vCluster (virtual clusters) and vNode (node-level isolation) so machines can move from bare metal provisioning into multi-tenant Kubernetes environments. We’ve shared a few other infrastructure projects here before (DevPod, vCluster), and the feedback from HN has been incredibly helpful. Curious how others here are handling bare metal provisioning today — MAAS, Ironic, Metal3, Tinkerbell, something custom?

Open to any feedback, positive or negative.