Grendel

6.5easy start · #18 of 29
in Bare Metal Provisioning Software

Free to practise onnot on record
Free trialnot on record
Well documentedyes
Runs where you worknot on record

Runs on api, Linux, self-hosted, Web.

Grendel is ranked #18 of 29 in bare metal provisioning software on The Geeks Club. It runs on API, Linux, Self-hosted, Web.

Compared on bare metal provisioning software

Bare-metal discovery: Yes
OS image deployment: Yes
PXE bootstrapping: Yes
API access: Yes
Out-of-band management: Yes

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The record

Purpose: Grendel is a bare-metal provisioning system for High Performance Computing Linux clusters.
Deployment: It supports DHCP/PXE/TFTP provisioning, DNS forward and reverse resolution, and automatic host discovery.
Provisioning modes: It supports diskful and stateless live-image provisioning.
Hardware control: It supports BMC/iDRAC control via RedFish and IPMI.
API and interface: Its HTTP API powers both the command-line client and built-in Web UI.
Security: The TCP API listener uses token authentication with role-based access control; HTTPS is recommended for remote access.
Integration: Grendel can serve as a ClusterShell clush group source, using tags to filter nodes.
Installation: The documentation provides Linux tar.gz, deb and rpm packages, plus a container image.
Database persistence: Unless installed with an rpm or deb package, the database is in memory by default and changes are lost on restart unless disk persistence is configured.
DNS limitation: Grendel is not a recursive DNS resolver; production deployments are recommended to run it behind a stub resolver such as unbound.
Intended users: The project describes its target as organizations that want to netboot a rack of servers, and assumes basic HPC, Linux and networking knowledge.
Provisioning: It provides DHCP, PXE, TFTP, DNS, and HTTP services for provisioning Linux systems over a network.
Host discovery: It can discover hosts by querying a switch, snooping DHCP packets, reading a dhcpd.leases file, or importing a tab-delimited file.
Boot images: Grendel supports booting Linux kernel and initrd images, including LiveOS images.

Where it ranks on The Geeks Club

Best Bare Metal Provisioning Software in 2026#18 of 29

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Sources

grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/· checked 2 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/web-ui-api/· checked 2 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/integrations/clush/· checked 2 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install/· checked 2 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/· checked 2 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/background/· checked 3 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/quickstart/· checked 3 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/advanced/https/· checked 3 Oct 2026
grendel.readthedocs.io· checked 28 Sept 2026