Provision Standalone Edge Nodes at scale#

This guide assumes the use of the OXM deployment profile of the on-premises Edge Orchestrator.

Set up environment#

Install Edge Orchestrator CLI. Please reach out to Intel to get access to the Edge Orchestrator CLI.

Login to the Edge Orchestrator.

orch-cli login local-admin $ORCH_PASSWORD --keycloak https://keycloak.cluster.onprem/realms/master

The token will be valid for limited period. To refresh you have to logout and login again:
```
orch-cli logout local-admin
```

Create default region and site that will be used for all provisioned Edge Nodes.

orch-cli create region --project local-admin default --type region --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem
# Retrieve region ID
orch-cli list region --project local-admin default --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem
orch-cli create site --project local-admin default --region <region-ID> --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem

Get and save the default site ID:

orch-cli list site --project local-admin default --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem
# Copy and save Site resource ID in format site-1234ABCD

Provision Edge Nodes at scale#

Follow the steps below to provision multiple Edge Nodes at once.

Generate custom cloud-init configuration for Standalone Edge Nodes.
- Download the config-file template from the Standalone Edge Node repository.
```
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-edge-platform/edge-microvisor-toolkit-standalone-node/refs/heads/sn-emt-uOS-integration/standalone-node/installation_scripts/config-file -o config-file
```
- Fill in the config-file as per the user guide in the in-line comments.
- You can customize the custom-config section as per your use case. For example, see reference cloud-init for EMT image with Desktop Virtualization features
- If you want to pre-load any user apps, create a directory and place all of your artifacts in that directory. Then, use the below command to compress user apps and copy them to the Edge Orchestrator’s storage. They will be downloaded to /opt/user-apps after EN is provisioned.
  
  Note
  
  See the document on pre-loading user apps in the USB installer for more details.
```
tar -czvf user-apps.tar.gz -C <path-to-directory-with-user-apps-folder>/user-apps/ ./
kubectl cp -n orch-infra user-apps.tar.gz  $(kubectl -n orch-infra get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=dkam --no-headers | awk '{print $1}'):/data
```
- Use orch-cli to generate custom cloud-init configuration based on config-file.
```
orch-cli generate standalone-config -c config-file -o cloud-init.cfg [--user-apps=true --api-endpoint https://api.<CLUSTER-FQDN>]
```
  Note
  
  Ensure you copied user apps as explain in the previous step. Also, --api-endpoint is mandatory when pre-loading user apps.

Create the custom cloud-init configuration object in the Edge Orchestrator.

orch-cli create customconfig standalone cloud-init.cfg --project local-admin --description "Cloud-init config for Standalone Edge Nodes"

Generate a CSV file for bulk registration of multiple Edge Nodes.
```
orch-cli create host -g=hosts.csv
```
The generated CSV file (hosts.csv) will contain the list of Serial Numbers of Edge Nodes to be provisioned.
Fill the CSV file with the list of Serial Numbers. The content of the file should look like:
```
Serial,UUID,OSProfile,Site,Secure,RemoteUser,Metadata,AMTEnable,CloudInitMeta,K8sClusterTemplate,Error - do not fill
1234567
ABCDCYZ
ZYXABCC
```
Note

The CSV file provides a possibility to specify different configurations (e.g., different cloud-init or OS profile) per each Edge Node identified by Serial Number. However, in this guide we assume that all Edge Nodes in the CSV list will be provisioned with the same configuration.
Register all Edge Nodes to the Edge Orchestrator:
```
orch-cli create host -i hosts.csv --site <site-ID> --cloud-init standalone --os-profile microvisor-standalone  --project local-admin --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem
```
Note

All Edge Nodes defined in hosts.csv will be provisioned with the same cloud-init (standalone) and OS profile (microvisor-standalone). If you need to provision a set of Edge Nodes with different cloud-init or OS profile you can store list of Edge Nodes in a separate CSV file and invoke the above command with the new CSV file and modified cloud-init/OS profile.
Now, you can start PXE boot from all Edge Node machines. You can observe their provisioning status with the below command:
```
orch-cli list host --project local-admin --api-endpoint https://api.cluster.onprem
```