Ironic is an integrated OpenStack project which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the Nova Baremetal driver. It is best thought of as a bare metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins which interact with the bare metal hypervisors. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI in concert to provision and turn on/off machines, but Ironic also supports vendor-specific plugins which may implement additional functionality.

Project Resources

Project status, bugs, and blueprints are tracked on Launchpad:

http://launchpad.net/ironic

Developer documentation can be found here:

http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic

Additional resources are linked from the project wiki page:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic

Anyone wishing to contribute to an OpenStack project should find a good reference here:

http://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/developers.html