The 'Build Server' is only used to build and deploy each Regional Controller. Therefore it can be considered ephemeral to the deployment and operation of the NC infrastructure.
Typically the build server would be created in a VM but could be a physical bare metal server.
The installation procedure to create the build server primarily involves cloning the set of repositories and packages implementing the Network Cloud Family in the R1 release.
Preflight requirements
Networking
The build server must have connectivity to the internet to be able to clone the necessary repos and packages.
Once built, the build server must have IP connectivity to any RCs it is to deploy. In addition it will usually act as the DHCP server for initial RC boot process thus must be in the same broadcast domain as the target RC.
Software
Before starting to clone upstream repos and packages the build server must have the following pre-installed
- Ubuntu Release 16.04
- Latest version of the following apt packages:
- docker (used to run dhcp and web containers)
- python (used for redfish api calls to bare metal server)
- python-requests (used for redfish api calls to bare metal server)
- python-pip (used to install hpe redfish tools)
- sshpass (used to copy keys to new server)
- xorriso (used to extract Ubuntu files to web server)
- make (used to build custom ipxe efi file used during bare metal server boot)
- gcc (used to build custom ipxe efi file used during bare metal server boot)