K-Forge

K-Forge is where you run BMO (Bare Metal Orchestration): taking a physical server with a reachable BMC through to a working Karios node, and returning it to inventory when you are done with it.

RBAC Prerequisite

Confirm with your administrator that your account has permission to access K-Forge and run node lifecycle actions.

Purpose

Use this section to onboard physical servers from Discovered to Configured.

BMO At a Glance

Key concepts:

  • Discovered: server registered, but hardware not yet revealed.

  • Hardware Reveal: boots a discovery image over the BMC to read the server’s real hardware.

  • Ready: hardware revealed and ready to provision.

  • In Progress: revealing, provisioning, configuring, or decommissioning now.

  • Configured: fully configured server ready for production workloads.

  • Decommission: full reset that removes all configuration and returns a Configured compute node to Discovered while keeping it in inventory.

  • BMC: out-of-band management interface for remote hardware control.

  • Supported vendors: Supermicro, Dell, HPE.

Lifecycle Flow

See BMO - Bare-Metal Onboarding for the current lifecycle from Discovered through Configured, including the dashboard state cards.

Dashboard Actions

From the K-Forge dashboard, users can:

  • Review lifecycle stage counts.

  • Open node details from server row / eye icon.

  • Open node Console for live operation visibility.

  • Run node operations from the row Action button according to lifecycle stage.

Continue with:

  • BMO - Bare-Metal Onboarding — the current end-to-end flow: add a host, hardware reveal, configure, and the per-host actions

  • Decommission — removing a node: safety checks, VM handling, forcing past a failure, and the teardown

Also in this section:

  • K-Forge - User Guide — node details for management and server nodes, hardware inventory, BIOS configuration, firmware updates, power actions, and access checks.