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Provisioning a bare metal server

Use Lumen® Edge Service Manager to provision Lumen® Edge Bare Metal servers (referred to as an instance in the Edge Service Manager) to run your dedicated services without interruption on reliable, physical hardware.

Before you provision a bare metal server, you must provision a network for the location you plan to provision the bare metal server. When you finish configuring a bare metal server, it can take up to 15 mintues to provision. After a bare metal server is provisioned, you can view the details and edit the information of the bare metal server. If you no longer need the bare metal server, you can delete it. 

Important: Before you provision a bare metal server, add your instance credentials (Linux or Windows) to your user profile to avoid being locked out. If you provision a bare metal server without adding credentials, delete the server, add your credentials, and then provision a replacement bare metal server. 

To provision a bare metal server:

  1. Click Provisioning, then click Catalog.

    The Edge Service Manager shows the available items in the provisioning catalog.
Edge Service Manager provisioning Catalog
  1. On the Order Bare Metal tile, click ORDER.

    The Edge Service Manager shows the Order Bare Metal screen.
Edge Service Manager bare metal order screen
  1. On the Order Bare Metal screen, complete the following fields:
Field Description
Group Select Lumen Edge Computing Solutions.
Name Type a name for the server.
Operating System Select an operating system for the server. The choice of operating system affects the price of the bare metal server. The price appears on this screen and updates according to your selections. Learn more about how server drives are partitioned
Version Select a version of the operating system for the server.
Location Select a physical location for the bare metal server. Bare metal servers must be in the same location as the assigned network.
Server Size Select a required server size. The configuration appears. The choice of server size affects the price of the bare metal server. To estimate the cost of server configuration, use the Edge Price Estimator.
Network Select a network for the server.
A network must be fully provisioned before it appears and can be selected.

The Edge Service Manager lists provisioned networks. If you just provisioned a network, the process can take up to five minutes to complete. The network appears for selection after the provisioning completes.
  1. If you do not have a provisioned network for the bare metal server location, the No network options available at this location message appears. You will not be able to complete the order for the bare metal server. You will need to provision a network, wait for the provisioning to complete, then start a new order to provision a bare metal server. To provision a network, click RESERVE A NETWORK. The network provisioning process can take up to five minutes to complete. After the network provisions, you can provision a bare metal server and the network will be available for selection.  
Edge Service Manager bare metal order reserve network view
  1. Click ORDER NOW.

    The Edge Service Manager starts to provision the bare metal server. This process can take up to 15 minutes to complete. Click Operations, then click Dashboard to track the progress of the provisioning and view the estimated time to completion. After the bare metal server is provisioned, you receive an email. Click Operations, then click Dashbord to check that the instance status is green and running.

Learn how storage is delivered to Lumen® Edge Bare Metal servers.

Lumen has limited insight into hardware-level failures due to the low level of hardware owned by customers. If a failure is detected, a specialist will contact you to coordinate maintenance.

Failed components

If your bare metal server experiences one of the following failed components, contact Edge Customer Care and provide the server name and your tenant (account) name:
 

  • disk: one or more disks have failed
  • memory DIMM (dual in-line memory module): seeing DIMM errors or not seeing the expected quantity of RAM (random access memory)
  • NIC (network interface card) or port: failure of NIC or a port on a NIC
  • power supply

Full failure

If your bare metal server experiences a full server failure (dead server), meaning the server is unable to ping, unable to perform power operations, fails on boot, or you have problems logging in to your bare metal server, contact Edge Customer Care. Provide the server name and your tenant (account) name to the specialist.

In the case of an unrecoverable hardware failure, we recommend deleting the bare metal server and provisioning a new bare metal server to replace it.

Important: It is your responsibility to maintain any data recovery or restoration process that may be necessary in the case of a critical hardware failure. There is no default configuration to protect against this.

Lumen is responsible for all hardware replacement for bare metal servers. Physical hardware support for servers is available only during core business hours (Monday through Friday, 9:00 am-5:00 pm) in the bare metal server location time zone. There is no SLA for hardware replacement; however, most hardware replacements are completed within four business days.

Some hardware failure scenarios require coordination with other customers in the shared environment and can take up to 12 days to coordinate maintenance. It is your responsibility to prepare for hardware failures and to architect redundancy of critical services running on bare metal servers.

If the standard storage for a bare metal configuration is not enough for your use case, you can add additional storage with Lumen® Network Storage.

Lumen Network Storage enables you to add and manage Edge storage with the Edge Service Manager all within Control Center.

Already have Network Storage? Learn more about managing Network Storage

Lumen Edge Bare Metal supports Terraform®. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure tool that uses declarative configuration files to define API calls using a write, plan, and apply workflow process. For more information, refer to the following documentation: