Bare Metal service limitations

updated: 2017/02/03

Bare Metal service limitations

When you deploy your environment using Fuel with Ironic, the OpenStack environment has the following limitations:

Limitation for an OpenStack environment with Ironic
Category Description
Network
  • Neutron with VLAN segmentation is the only supported networking option.
Storage
  • Ironic does not support attaching or booting from the volumes stored in Cinder.
  • Ironic requires a swift-compatible object storage. You can use Swift or RADOS Gateway.
Security
  • No tenant-level network separation is supported for physical machines on which you deploy instances. All physical machines are visible to all tenants and to each other on the physical network level.
  • Neutron security groups do not apply to instances deployed on physical machines.
Virtualization platform VMware vCenter as a hypervisor is not supported.
Fuel plug-ins Ironic supports all Fuel plug-ins as long as their requirements do not interfere with ironic limitations. For example, if a plug-in requires you to configure any other networking option but Neutron with VLAN segmentation, you cannot use this plug-in with ironic.
Management

  • Auto-discovery is not supported.

    Ironic cannot automatically discover the physical machines that you will use to create instances. Therefore, you must have description of the server hardware available including CPU, RAM, disks, MAC addresses, and so on to manually discover them. You must also have information required to configure power and BIOS settings, such as IPMI address or FQDN, as well as the IPMI user name and password with administrator privileges for IPMI.

  • Horizon is partially supported.

    Although you can launch an instance on a physical machine using Horizon, you must perform all other operations with physical nodes through APIs or CLI. Many operations that are typically supported for virtual machines, such as pausing and resuming, are not supported for physical machines. However, they are still present in the Horizon UI.

  • Only admin can manage operations with Ironic.

    Only an OpenStack user with the admin role can operate the Ironic service.
updated: 2017/02/03
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