Architecture Overview

orcharhino exists to manage IT infrastructures from one central place. As such, every orcharhino deployment comes with one orcharhino installation.

The orcharhino can be used to manage any bare metal hosts within its own network. More commonly, the orcharhino will be configured to manage hosts deployed on one or more compute resources within the same network.

All host meta data, provisioning data, and content repositories are stored on one or more underlying databases on the orcharhino.

In the simplest use case, the orcharhino will come bundled with so called smart proxy functionality. Typical smart proxy functionality includes DHCP, DNS, and TFTP services, as well as a Puppet CA. In more complex scenarios, orcharhino proxies can also be used to allow the orcharhino to manage IT infrastructures across network boundaries.

orcharhino users can interact with orcharhino using a browser based web interface on any host capable of resolving a route to your orcharhino.

The following graphical representation of the basic orcharhino architecture helps clarify the above:

Basic scenario of a typical orcharhino installation