Firmware validation utility
Automating the qualification of bare metal servers
- Period
- 2024 – 2026
- Status
- Deployed internally
- Role
- Design and development
- Stack
When a new server generation is introduced (NPI, New Product Introduction), every machine has to be qualified: BMC, UEFI, network and storage firmware versions, configuration parameters, consistency with the validated reference. Done by hand, this work is slow and error-prone.
The problem
- Dozens of firmware components per platform, with heterogeneous ways of reading them (IPMI, Redfish, vendor utilities).
- References that move with every supplier fix.
- Results recorded manually, hard to compare from one campaign to the next.
What the tool does
The utility queries the target server, collects the firmware inventory and configuration, then compares them with the expected reference for the platform. It produces a report that hardware teams can read and tracking tools can consume.
It was built with internal APIs so that it integrates with RUN operations, not only with validation campaigns.
Outcome
Deployed and used by several hardware teams. Fewer manual steps, fewer data-entry errors, and faster, more reproducible validation campaigns.
Implementation details are internal to OVHcloud; this page describes the project in broad strokes.