The baremetal driver is a hypervisor driver for OpenStack Nova Compute. Within the OpenStack framework, it has the same role as the drivers for other hypervisors (libvirt, xen, etc), and yet it is presently unique in that the hardware is not virtualized - there is no hypervisor between the tenants and the physical hardware. It exposes hardware through the OpenStack APIs, using pluggable sub-drivers to deliver machine imaging (PXE) and power control (IPMI). With this, provisioning and management of physical hardware is accomplished by using common cloud APIs and tools, such as the Orchestration module (heat) or salt-cloud. However, due to this unique situation, using the baremetal driver requires some additional preparation of its environment, the details of which are beyond the scope of this guide. Some OpenStack Compute features are not implemented by the baremetal hypervisor driver. See the hypervisor support matrix for details. For the Baremetal driver to be loaded and function properly, ensure that the following options are set in /etc/nova/nova.conf on your nova-compute hosts. [default] compute_driver=nova.virt.baremetal.driver.BareMetalDriver firewall_driver = nova.virt.firewall.NoopFirewallDriver scheduler_host_manager=nova.scheduler.baremetal_host_manager.BaremetalHostManager ram_allocation_ratio=1.0 reserved_host_memory_mb=0 Many configuration options are specific to the Baremetal driver. Also, some additional steps are required, such as building the baremetal deploy ramdisk. See the main wiki page for details and implementation suggestions.