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Razor is an advanced provisioning application, which can deploy both bare-metal and virtual systems. It's aimed at solving the problem of how to bring new metal into a state where your existing DevOps/configuration management workflows can take it over.

Newly added machines in a Razor deployment will PXE-boot from a special microkernel image, then check in, provide Razor with inventory information, and wait for further instructions. Razor will consult user-created policy rules to choose which preconfigured model to apply to a new node, and the node will begin to follow the model's directions, giving feedback to Razor as it completes various steps. Models can include a handoff to a configuration management system, or to some other system able to take control of the node (such as a vCenter server able to take possession of ESX systems).

Using Razor

Razor's capabilities are divided into "Slices" -- sub-applications which can be used from the command line or from a RESTful API.

See here for Razor Slices Command Line Usage.

See below for a list of slices and their individual usage:

• slice bmc
• slice broker
• slice config
• slice image
• slice log
• slice model
• slice node
• slice policy

For an example of provisioning new ESX servers and handing them off to vCenter, see Provisioning ESXi.

And see here for a general overview of Razor's workflow.