Jun Xie, Yujie Su, Zhaowen Lin, Yan Ma, and Junxue Liang

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Abstract—Cloud computing relies heavily on virtualization technologies. This also applies to OpenStack, which is currently the most popular IaaS platform; it mainly provides virtual machines to cloud end users. However, virtualization unavoidably brings some performance penalty, contrasted with bare metal provisioning. In this paper, we present our approach for extending OpenStack to support bare metal provisioning through xCAT(Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit). As a result, the cloud platform could be deployed to provide both virtual machines and bare metal machines. This paper firstly introduces why bare metal machines are desirable in a cloud platform, then it describes OpenStack briefly and also the xCAT driver, which makes xCAT work with the rest of the OpenStack platform in order to provision bare metal machines to cloud end users. At the end, it presents a performance comparison between a virtualized and baremetal environment

Index Terms—cloud computing, IaaS, OpenStack, xCAT, bare metal provisioning

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Cite: Jun Xie, Yujie Su, Zhaowen Lin, Yan Ma, and Junxue Liang, " Bare Metal Provisioning to OpenStack Using xCAT," Journal of Computers vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 1691-1695, 2013.