Hardware support detection

Hardware Observer checks for supported components (IPMI, Redfish, RAID controller, etc.) by using lshw. The charm parses various attributes found in the lshw output such as system vendor name (e.g.: Dell, HP), storage controller type (SAS vs RAID), GPU vendor (e.g.: NVIDIA or AMD), and controller manufacturer (e.g.: Broadcom) to determine the components present on the managed machine.

For example:

The Smart Storage Admin CLI (SSACLI) tool that manages HP controllers is detected from the lshw output by checking if the storage id is “raid”, the vendor name is “HP” and the product name matches one in the list that we maintain in the charm. The list can be found here.