# Baremetal system installation and configuration with Ansible **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Tags:** ansible-project\ **Created:** [May 22, 2013, 8:07pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/baremetal-system-installation-and-configuration-with-ansible/12850 "2013-05-22T20:07:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan2](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan2)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2013, 8:07pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/baremetal-system-installation-and-configuration-with-ansible/12850/1 "2013-05-22T20:07:36Z")
Right now we don’t have to have plugins to any particular configuration system, but obviously I do prefer Cobbler because it’s better 🙂 Razor to me feels like a research experiment because I very seldom want to choose what I want to install based on hardware class and often want to purpose machines based on _need_ with different machines all being installed to the same hardware class. That being said, if it can support Chef, I’m sure we’re fine with it too. I also haven’t seen many people using it in production – by comparison, Cobbler rolled out the international DNS system across ~20 different data centers. Basically setup with a bare metal system is nothing more than provisioning an SSH key in kickstart or preseed post (super easy). (AnsibleWorks is also working on a really cool callback system so a newly brought up system can phone home and request instant configuration, this will require our server solution) There are already in the plugins/inventory directory a inventory plugin for sourcing inventory from Cobbler, and also a bunch of other cloud systems. Ansible is pretty friendly in that if your inventory source is a directory you can pull from multiple inventories (bare metal + cloud + other cloud + INI file) all at once and talk to machines without caring about where they are.