Installation Guide

This document is continually updated and reflects the latest available code of the Bare Metal service (ironic). Users of releases may encounter differences and are encouraged to look at earlier versions of this document for guidance.

Service overview

The Bare Metal service is a collection of components that provides support to manage and provision physical machines.

Also known as the ironic project, the Bare Metal service may, depending upon configuration, interact with several other OpenStack services. This includes:

  • the OpenStack Telemetry module (ceilometer) for consuming the IPMI metrics
  • the OpenStack Identity service (keystone) for request authentication and to locate other OpenStack services
  • the OpenStack Image service (glance) from which to retrieve images and image meta-data
  • the OpenStack Networking service (neutron) for DHCP and network configuration
  • the OpenStack Compute service (nova) works with the Bare Metal service and acts as a user-facing API for instance management, while the Bare Metal service provides the admin/operator API for hardware management. The OpenStack Compute service also provides scheduling facilities (matching flavors <-> images <-> hardware), tenant quotas, IP assignment, and other services which the Bare Metal service does not, in and of itself, provide.
  • the OpenStack Block Storage (cinder) provides volumes, but this aspect is not yet available.

The Bare Metal service includes the following components:

  • ironic-api: A RESTful API that processes application requests by sending them to the ironic-conductor over RPC.
  • ironic-conductor: Adds/edits/deletes nodes; powers on/off nodes with ipmi or ssh; provisions/deploys/decommissions bare metal nodes.
  • ironic-python-agent: A python service which is run in a temporary ramdisk to provide ironic-conductor service(s) with remote access and in-band hardware control.
  • python-ironicclient: A command-line interface (CLI) for interacting with the Bare Metal service.

Additionally, the Bare Metal service has certain external dependencies, which are very similar to other OpenStack services:

  • A database to store hardware information and state. You can set the database back-end type and location. A simple approach is to use the same database back end as the Compute service. Another approach is to use a separate database back-end to further isolate bare metal resources (and associated metadata) from users.
  • A queue. A central hub for passing messages, such as RabbitMQ. It should use the same implementation as that of the Compute service.

Optionally, one may wish to utilize the following associated projects for additional functionality:

  • ironic-inspector; An associated service which performs in-band hardware introspection by PXE booting unregistered hardware into a “discovery ramdisk”.
  • diskimage-builder; May be used to customize machine images, create and discovery deploy ramdisks, if necessary.
  • bifrost; a set of Ansible playbooks that automates the task of deploying a base image onto a set of known hardware using ironic.

Install and configure prerequisites

The Bare Metal service is a collection of components that provides support to manage and provision physical machines. You can configure these components to run on separate nodes or the same node. In this guide, the components run on one node, typically the Compute Service’s compute node.

This section shows you how to install and configure the components.

It assumes that the Identity, Image, Compute, and Networking services have already been set up.

Configure the Identity service for the Bare Metal service

  1. Create the Bare Metal service user (for example,``ironic``). The service uses this to authenticate with the Identity service. Use the service tenant and give the user the admin role:

    openstack user create --password IRONIC_PASSWORD \
    --email ironic@example.com ironic
    openstack role add --project service --user ironic admin
    
  2. You must register the Bare Metal service with the Identity service so that other OpenStack services can locate it. To register the service:

    openstack service create --name ironic --description \
    "Ironic baremetal provisioning service" baremetal
    
  3. Use the id property that is returned from the Identity service when registering the service (above), to create the endpoint, and replace IRONIC_NODE with your Bare Metal service’s API node:

    openstack endpoint create --region RegionOne \
    --publicurl http://IRONIC_NODE:6385 \
    --internalurl http://IRONIC_NODE:6385 \
    --adminurl http://IRONIC_NODE:6385 \
    baremetal
    

Set up the database for Bare Metal

The Bare Metal service stores information in a database. This guide uses the MySQL database that is used by other OpenStack services.

  1. In MySQL, create an ironic database that is accessible by the ironic user. Replace IRONIC_DBPASSWORD with a suitable password:

    # mysql -u root -p
    mysql> CREATE DATABASE ironic CHARACTER SET utf8;
    mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ironic.* TO 'ironic'@'localhost' \
    IDENTIFIED BY 'IRONIC_DBPASSWORD';
    mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ironic.* TO 'ironic'@'%' \
    IDENTIFIED BY 'IRONIC_DBPASSWORD';
    

Install the Bare Metal service

  1. Install from packages and configure services:

    Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) or higher:
        sudo apt-get install ironic-api ironic-conductor python-ironicclient
    
    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo yum install openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor \
        python-ironicclient
        sudo systemctl enable openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor
        sudo systemctl start openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
        sudo dnf install openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor \
        python-ironicclient
        sudo systemctl enable openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor
        sudo systemctl start openstack-ironic-api openstack-ironic-conductor
    

Configure the Bare Metal service

The Bare Metal service is configured via its configuration file. This file is typically located at /etc/ironic/ironic.conf.

Although some configuration options are mentioned here, it is recommended that you review all the available options so that the Bare Metal service is configured for your needs.

It is possible to set up an ironic-api and an ironic-conductor services on the same host or different hosts. Users also can add new ironic-conductor hosts to deal with an increasing number of bare metal nodes. But the additional ironic-conductor services should be at the same version as that of existing ironic-conductor services.

Configuring ironic-api service

  1. The Bare Metal service stores information in a database. This guide uses the MySQL database that is used by other OpenStack services.

    Configure the location of the database via the connection option. In the following, replace IRONIC_DBPASSWORD with the password of your ironic user, and replace DB_IP with the IP address where the DB server is located:

    [database]
    ...
    # The SQLAlchemy connection string used to connect to the
    # database (string value)
    connection = mysql+pymysql://ironic:IRONIC_DBPASSWORD@DB_IP/ironic?charset=utf8
    
  2. Configure the ironic-api service to use the RabbitMQ message broker by setting one or more of these options. Replace RABBIT_HOST with the address of the RabbitMQ server:

    [DEFAULT]
    ...
    # The messaging driver to use, defaults to rabbit. Other
    # drivers include qpid and zmq. (string value)
    #rpc_backend=rabbit
    
    [oslo_messaging_rabbit]
    ...
    # The RabbitMQ broker address where a single node is used
    # (string value)
    rabbit_host=RABBIT_HOST
    
    # The RabbitMQ userid (string value)
    #rabbit_userid=guest
    
    # The RabbitMQ password (string value)
    #rabbit_password=guest
    
  3. Configure the ironic-api service to use these credentials with the Identity service. Replace IDENTITY_IP with the IP of the Identity server, and replace IRONIC_PASSWORD with the password you chose for the ironic user in the Identity service:

    [DEFAULT]
    ...
    # Authentication strategy used by ironic-api: one of
    # "keystone" or "noauth". "noauth" should not be used in a
    # production environment because all authentication will be
    # disabled. (string value)
    #auth_strategy=keystone
    
    [keystone_authtoken]
    ...
    # Complete public Identity API endpoint (string value)
    auth_uri=http://IDENTITY_IP:5000/
    
    # Complete admin Identity API endpoint. This should specify
    # the unversioned root endpoint e.g. https://localhost:35357/
    # (string value)
    identity_uri=http://IDENTITY_IP:35357/
    
    # Service username. (string value)
    admin_user=ironic
    
    # Service account password. (string value)
    admin_password=IRONIC_PASSWORD
    
    # Service tenant name. (string value)
    admin_tenant_name=service
    
  4. Create the Bare Metal service database tables:

    ironic-dbsync --config-file /etc/ironic/ironic.conf create_schema
    
  5. Restart the ironic-api service:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-ironic-api
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service ironic-api restart
    

Configuring ironic-conductor service

  1. Replace HOST_IP with IP of the conductor host, and replace DRIVERS with a comma-separated list of drivers you chose for the conductor service as follows:

    [DEFAULT]
    ...
    # IP address of this host. If unset, will determine the IP
    # programmatically. If unable to do so, will use "127.0.0.1".
    # (string value)
    my_ip = HOST_IP
    
    # Specify the list of drivers to load during service
    # initialization. Missing drivers, or drivers which fail to
    # initialize, will prevent the conductor service from
    # starting. The option default is a recommended set of
    # production-oriented drivers. A complete list of drivers
    # present on your system may be found by enumerating the
    # "ironic.drivers" entrypoint. An example may be found in the
    # developer documentation online. (list value)
    enabled_drivers=DRIVERS
    

    Note

    If a conductor host has multiple IPs, my_ip should be set to the IP which is on the same network as the bare metal nodes.

  2. Configure the ironic-api service URL. Replace IRONIC_API_IP with IP of ironic-api service as follows:

    [conductor]
    ...
    # URL of Ironic API service. If not set ironic can get the
    # current value from the keystone service catalog. (string
    # value)
    api_url=http://IRONIC_API_IP:6385
    
  3. Configure the location of the database. Ironic-conductor should use the same configuration as ironic-api. Replace IRONIC_DBPASSWORD with the password of your ironic user, and replace DB_IP with the IP address where the DB server is located:

    [database]
    ...
    # The SQLAlchemy connection string to use to connect to the
    # database. (string value)
    connection = mysql+pymysql://ironic:IRONIC_DBPASSWORD@DB_IP/ironic?charset=utf8
    
  4. Configure the ironic-conductor service to use the RabbitMQ message broker by setting one or more of these options. Ironic-conductor should use the same configuration as ironic-api. Replace RABBIT_HOST with the address of the RabbitMQ server:

    [DEFAULT]
    ...
    # The messaging driver to use, defaults to rabbit. Other
    # drivers include qpid and zmq. (string value)
    #rpc_backend=rabbit
    
    [oslo_messaging_rabbit]
    ...
    # The RabbitMQ broker address where a single node is used.
    # (string value)
    rabbit_host=RABBIT_HOST
    
    # The RabbitMQ userid. (string value)
    #rabbit_userid=guest
    
    # The RabbitMQ password. (string value)
    #rabbit_password=guest
    
  5. Configure the ironic-conductor service so that it can communicate with the Image service. Replace GLANCE_IP with the hostname or IP address of the Image service:

    [glance]
    ...
    # Default glance hostname or IP address. (string value)
    glance_host=GLANCE_IP
    

    Note

    Swift backend for the Image service should be installed and configured for agent_* drivers. Starting with Mitaka the Bare Metal service also supports Ceph Object Gateway (RADOS Gateway) as the Image service’s backend (Ceph Object Gateway support).

  6. Set the URL (replace NEUTRON_IP) for connecting to the Networking service, to be the Networking service endpoint:

    [neutron]
    ...
    # URL for connecting to neutron. (string value)
    url=http://NEUTRON_IP:9696
    

    To configure the network for ironic-conductor service to perform node cleaning, see CleaningNetworkSetup.

  7. Configure the ironic-conductor service to use these credentials with the Identity service. Ironic-conductor should use the same configuration as ironic-api. Replace IDENTITY_IP with the IP of the Identity server, and replace IRONIC_PASSWORD with the password you chose for the ironic user in the Identity service:

    [keystone_authtoken]
    ...
    # Complete public Identity API endpoint (string value)
    auth_uri=http://IDENTITY_IP:5000/
    
    # Complete admin Identity API endpoint. This should specify
    # the unversioned root endpoint e.g. https://localhost:35357/
    # (string value)
    identity_uri=http://IDENTITY_IP:35357/
    
    # Service username. (string value)
    admin_user=ironic
    
    # Service account password. (string value)
    admin_password=IRONIC_PASSWORD
    
    # Service tenant name. (string value)
    admin_tenant_name=service
    
  8. Make sure that qemu-img and iscsiadm (in the case of using iscsi-deploy driver) binaries are installed and prepare the host system as described at Setup the drivers for the Bare Metal service

  9. Restart the ironic-conductor service:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-ironic-conductor
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service ironic-conductor restart
    

Configuring ironic-api behind mod_wsgi

Bare Metal service comes with an example file for configuring the ironic-api service to run behind Apache with mod_wsgi.

  1. Install the apache service:

    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo yum install httpd
    
    Fedora 22 (or higher):
      sudo dnf install httpd
    
    Debian/Ubuntu:
      apt-get install apache2
    
  2. Copy the etc/apache2/ironic file under the apache sites:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo cp etc/apache2/ironic /etc/httpd/conf.d/ironic.conf
    
    Debian/Ubuntu:
      sudo cp etc/apache2/ironic /etc/apache2/sites-available/ironic.conf
    
  3. Edit the recently copied <apache-configuration-dir>/ironic.conf:

  • Modify the WSGIDaemonProcess, APACHE_RUN_USER and APACHE_RUN_GROUP directives to set the user and group values to an appropriate user on your server.
  • Modify the WSGIScriptAlias directive to point to the ironic/api/app.wsgi script.
  • Modify the Directory directive to set the path to the Ironic API code.
  1. Enable the apache ironic in site and reload:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl reload httpd
    
    Debian/Ubuntu:
      sudo a2ensite ironic
      sudo service apache2 reload
    

Note

The file ironic/api/app.wsgi is installed with the rest of the Bare Metal service application code, and should not need to be modified.

Configure Compute to use the Bare Metal service

The Compute service needs to be configured to use the Bare Metal service’s driver. The configuration file for the Compute service is typically located at /etc/nova/nova.conf. This configuration file must be modified on the Compute service’s controller nodes and compute nodes.

  1. Change these configuration options in the default section, as follows:

    [default]
    
    # Driver to use for controlling virtualization. Options
    # include: libvirt.LibvirtDriver, xenapi.XenAPIDriver,
    # fake.FakeDriver, baremetal.BareMetalDriver,
    # vmwareapi.VMwareESXDriver, vmwareapi.VMwareVCDriver (string
    # value)
    #compute_driver=<None>
    compute_driver=ironic.IronicDriver
    
    # Firewall driver (defaults to hypervisor specific iptables
    # driver) (string value)
    #firewall_driver=<None>
    firewall_driver=nova.virt.firewall.NoopFirewallDriver
    
    # The scheduler host manager class to use (string value)
    #scheduler_host_manager=nova.scheduler.host_manager.HostManager
    scheduler_host_manager=nova.scheduler.ironic_host_manager.IronicHostManager
    
    # Virtual ram to physical ram allocation ratio which affects
    # all ram filters. This configuration specifies a global ratio
    # for RamFilter. For AggregateRamFilter, it will fall back to
    # this configuration value if no per-aggregate setting found.
    # (floating point value)
    #ram_allocation_ratio=1.5
    ram_allocation_ratio=1.0
    
    # Amount of disk in MB to reserve for the host (integer value)
    #reserved_host_disk_mb=0
    reserved_host_memory_mb=0
    
    # Full class name for the Manager for compute (string value)
    #compute_manager=nova.compute.manager.ComputeManager
    compute_manager=ironic.nova.compute.manager.ClusteredComputeManager
    
    # Flag to decide whether to use baremetal_scheduler_default_filters or not.
    # (boolean value)
    #scheduler_use_baremetal_filters=False
    scheduler_use_baremetal_filters=True
    
    # Determines if the Scheduler tracks changes to instances to help with
    # its filtering decisions (boolean value)
    #scheduler_tracks_instance_changes=True
    scheduler_tracks_instance_changes=False
    
  2. Change these configuration options in the ironic section. Replace:

    • IRONIC_PASSWORD with the password you chose for the ironic user in the Identity Service
    • IRONIC_NODE with the hostname or IP address of the ironic-api node
    • IDENTITY_IP with the IP of the Identity server
[ironic]

# Ironic keystone admin name
admin_username=ironic

#Ironic keystone admin password.
admin_password=IRONIC_PASSWORD

# keystone API endpoint
admin_url=http://IDENTITY_IP:35357/v2.0

# Ironic keystone tenant name.
admin_tenant_name=service

# URL for Ironic API endpoint.
api_endpoint=http://IRONIC_NODE:6385/v1
  1. On the Compute service’s controller nodes, restart the nova-scheduler process:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-nova-scheduler
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service nova-scheduler restart
    
  2. On the Compute service’s compute nodes, restart the nova-compute process:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-nova-compute
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service nova-compute restart
    

Configure Networking to communicate with the bare metal server

You need to configure Networking so that the bare metal server can communicate with the Networking service for DHCP, PXE boot and other requirements. This section covers configuring Networking for a single flat network for bare metal provisioning.

You will also need to provide Bare Metal service with the MAC address(es) of each node that it is provisioning; Bare Metal service in turn will pass this information to Networking service for DHCP and PXE boot configuration. An example of this is shown in the Enrollment section.

  1. Edit /etc/neutron/plugins/ml2/ml2_conf.ini and modify these:

    [ml2]
    type_drivers = flat
    tenant_network_types = flat
    mechanism_drivers = openvswitch
    
    [ml2_type_flat]
    flat_networks = physnet1
    
    [ml2_type_vlan]
    network_vlan_ranges = physnet1
    
    [securitygroup]
    firewall_driver = neutron.agent.linux.iptables_firewall.OVSHybridIptablesFirewallDriver
    enable_security_group = True
    
    [ovs]
    bridge_mappings = physnet1:br-eth2
    # Replace eth2 with the interface on the neutron node which you
    # are using to connect to the bare metal server
    
  2. If neutron-openvswitch-agent runs with ovs_neutron_plugin.ini as the input config-file, edit ovs_neutron_plugin.ini to configure the bridge mappings by adding the [ovs] section described in the previous step, and restart the neutron-openvswitch-agent.

  3. Add the integration bridge to Open vSwitch:

    ovs-vsctl add-br br-int
    
  4. Create the br-eth2 network bridge to handle communication between the OpenStack services (and the Bare Metal services) and the bare metal nodes using eth2. Replace eth2 with the interface on the network node which you are using to connect to the Bare Metal service:

    ovs-vsctl add-br br-eth2
    ovs-vsctl add-port br-eth2 eth2
    
  5. Restart the Open vSwitch agent:

    service neutron-plugin-openvswitch-agent restart
    
  6. On restarting the Networking service Open vSwitch agent, the veth pair between the bridges br-int and br-eth2 is automatically created.

    Your Open vSwitch bridges should look something like this after following the above steps:

    ovs-vsctl show
    
        Bridge br-int
            fail_mode: secure
            Port "int-br-eth2"
                Interface "int-br-eth2"
                    type: patch
                    options: {peer="phy-br-eth2"}
            Port br-int
                Interface br-int
                    type: internal
        Bridge "br-eth2"
            Port "phy-br-eth2"
                Interface "phy-br-eth2"
                    type: patch
                    options: {peer="int-br-eth2"}
            Port "eth2"
                Interface "eth2"
            Port "br-eth2"
                Interface "br-eth2"
                    type: internal
        ovs_version: "2.3.0"
    
  7. Create the flat network on which you are going to launch the instances:

    neutron net-create --tenant-id $TENANT_ID sharednet1 --shared \
    --provider:network_type flat --provider:physical_network physnet1
    
  8. Create the subnet on the newly created network:

    neutron subnet-create sharednet1 $NETWORK_CIDR --name $SUBNET_NAME \
    --ip-version=4 --gateway=$GATEWAY_IP --allocation-pool \
    start=$START_IP,end=$END_IP --enable-dhcp
    

Configure the Bare Metal service for cleaning

  1. If you configure Bare Metal service to use Node cleaning (which is enabled by default), you will need to set the cleaning_network_uuid configuration option. Note the network UUID (the id field) of the network you created in Configure Networking to communicate with the bare metal server or another network you created for cleaning:

    neutron net-list
    
  2. Configure the cleaning network UUID via the cleaning_network_uuid option in the Bare Metal service configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf). In the following, replace NETWORK_UUID with the UUID you noted in the previous step:

    [neutron]
    ...
    
    # UUID of the network to create Neutron ports on, when booting
    # to a ramdisk for cleaning using Neutron DHCP. (string value)
    #cleaning_network_uuid=<None>
    cleaning_network_uuid = NETWORK_UUID
    
  3. Restart the Bare Metal service’s ironic-conductor:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-ironic-conductor
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service ironic-conductor restart
    

Image requirements

Bare Metal provisioning requires two sets of images: the deploy images and the user images. The deploy images are used by the Bare Metal service to prepare the bare metal server for actual OS deployment. Whereas the user images are installed on the bare metal server to be used by the end user. Below are the steps to create the required images and add them to the Image service:

  1. The disk-image-builder can be used to create images required for deployment and the actual OS which the user is going to run.
Note: tripleo-incubator provides a script to install all the dependencies for the disk-image-builder.
  • Install diskimage-builder package (use virtualenv, if you don’t want to install anything globally):

    sudo pip install diskimage-builder
    
  • Build the image your users will run (Ubuntu image has been taken as an example):

    Partition images:
        disk-image-create ubuntu baremetal dhcp-all-interfaces grub2 -o my-image
    
    Whole disk images:
        disk-image-create ubuntu vm dhcp-all-interfaces -o my-image
    

    The partition image command creates my-image.qcow2, my-image.vmlinuz and my-image.initrd files. The grub2 element in the partition image creation command is only needed if local boot will be used to deploy my-image.qcow2, otherwise the images my-image.vmlinuz and my-image.initrd will be used for PXE booting after deploying the bare metal with my-image.qcow2.

    If you want to use Fedora image, replace ubuntu with fedora in the chosen command.

  • To build the deploy image take a look at the Building or downloading a deploy ramdisk image section.

  1. Add the user images to the Image service

    Load all the images created in the below steps into the Image service, and note the image UUIDs in the Image service for each one as it is generated.

    • Add the kernel and ramdisk images to the Image service:

      glance image-create --name my-kernel --visibility public \
      --disk-format aki --container-format aki  < my-image.vmlinuz
      

      Store the image uuid obtained from the above step as $MY_VMLINUZ_UUID.

      glance image-create --name my-image.initrd --visibility public \
      --disk-format ari --container-format ari  < my-image.initrd
      

      Store the image UUID obtained from the above step as $MY_INITRD_UUID.

    • Add the my-image to the Image service which is going to be the OS that the user is going to run. Also associate the above created images with this OS image. These two operations can be done by executing the following command:

      glance image-create --name my-image --visibility public \
      --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare --property \
      kernel_id=$MY_VMLINUZ_UUID --property \
      ramdisk_id=$MY_INITRD_UUID < my-image.qcow2
      
    • Note: To deploy a whole disk image, a kernel_id and a ramdisk_id shouldn’t be associated with the image. An example is as follows:

      glance image-create --name my-whole-disk-image --visibility public \
      --disk-format qcow2 \
      --container-format bare < my-whole-disk-image.qcow2
      
  2. Add the deploy images to the Image service

    Add the my-deploy-ramdisk.kernel and my-deploy-ramdisk.initramfs images to the Image service:

    glance image-create --name deploy-vmlinuz --visibility public \
    --disk-format aki --container-format aki < my-deploy-ramdisk.kernel
    

    Store the image UUID obtained from the above step as $DEPLOY_VMLINUZ_UUID.

    glance image-create --name deploy-initrd --visibility public \
    --disk-format ari --container-format ari < my-deploy-ramdisk.initramfs
    

    Store the image UUID obtained from the above step as $DEPLOY_INITRD_UUID.

Flavor creation

You’ll need to create a special bare metal flavor in the Compute service. The flavor is mapped to the bare metal node through the hardware specifications.

  1. Change these to match your hardware:

    RAM_MB=1024
    CPU=2
    DISK_GB=100
    ARCH={i686|x86_64}
    
  2. Create the bare metal flavor by executing the following command:

    nova flavor-create my-baremetal-flavor auto $RAM_MB $DISK_GB $CPU
    

    Note: You can replace auto with your own flavor id.

  3. Set the architecture as extra_specs information of the flavor. This will be used to match against the properties of bare metal nodes:

    nova flavor-key my-baremetal-flavor set cpu_arch=$ARCH
    
  4. Associate the deploy ramdisk and kernel images with the ironic node:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add \
    driver_info/deploy_kernel=$DEPLOY_VMLINUZ_UUID \
    driver_info/deploy_ramdisk=$DEPLOY_INITRD_UUID
    

Setup the drivers for the Bare Metal service

PXE setup

If you will be using PXE, it needs to be set up on the Bare Metal service node(s) where ironic-conductor is running.

  1. Make sure the tftp root directory exist and can be written to by the user the ironic-conductor is running as. For example:

    sudo mkdir -p /tftpboot
    sudo chown -R ironic /tftpboot
    
  2. Install tftp server and the syslinux package with the PXE boot images:

    Ubuntu: (Up to and including 14.04)
        sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa syslinux-common syslinux
    
    Ubuntu: (14.10 and after)
        sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa syslinux-common pxelinux
    
    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo yum install tftp-server syslinux-tftpboot
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
         sudo dnf install tftp-server syslinux-tftpboot
    
  3. Setup tftp server to serve /tftpboot.

  4. Copy the PXE image to /tftpboot. The PXE image might be found at [1]:

    Ubuntu (Up to and including 14.04):
        sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot
    
    Ubuntu (14.10 and after):
        sudo cp /usr/lib/PXELINUX/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot
    
  5. If whole disk images need to be deployed via PXE-netboot, copy the chain.c32 image to /tftpboot to support it. The chain.c32 image might be found at:

    Ubuntu (Up to and including 14.04):
        sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/chain.c32 /tftpboot
    
    Ubuntu (14.10 and after):
        sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/modules/bios/chain.c32 /tftpboot
    
    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo cp /boot/extlinux/chain.c32 /tftpboot
    
  6. If the version of syslinux is greater than 4 we also need to make sure that we copy the library modules into the /tftpboot directory [2] [1]:

    Ubuntu:
        sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/modules/*/ldlinux.* /tftpboot
    
  7. Create a map file in the tftp boot directory (/tftpboot):

    echo 're ^(/tftpboot/) /tftpboot/\2' > /tftpboot/map-file
    echo 're ^/tftpboot/ /tftpboot/' >> /tftpboot/map-file
    echo 're ^(^/) /tftpboot/\1' >> /tftpboot/map-file
    echo 're ^([^/]) /tftpboot/\1' >> /tftpboot/map-file
    
  8. Enable tftp map file, modify /etc/xinetd.d/tftp as below and restart xinetd service:

    server_args = -v -v -v -v -v --map-file /tftpboot/map-file /tftpboot
    
[1](1, 2) On Fedora/RHEL the syslinux-tftpboot package already install the library modules and PXE image at /tftpboot. If the TFTP server is configured to listen to a different directory you should copy the contents of /tftpboot to the configured directory
[2]http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Library_modules

PXE UEFI setup

If you want to deploy on a UEFI supported bare metal, perform these additional steps on the ironic conductor node to configure the PXE UEFI environment.

  1. Download and untar the elilo bootloader version >= 3.16 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo/:

    sudo tar zxvf elilo-3.16-all.tar.gz
    
  2. Copy the elilo boot loader image to /tftpboot directory:

    sudo cp ./elilo-3.16-x86_64.efi /tftpboot/elilo.efi
    
  3. Grub2 is an alternate UEFI bootloader supported in Bare Metal service. Install grub2 and shim packages:

    Ubuntu: (14.04LTS and later)
        sudo apt-get install grub-efi-amd64-signed shim-signed
    
    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo yum install grub2-efi shim
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
        sudo dnf install grub2-efi shim
    
  4. Copy grub and shim boot loader images to /tftpboot directory:

    Ubuntu: (14.04LTS and later)
        sudo cp /usr/lib/shim/shim.efi.signed /tftpboot/bootx64.efi
        sudo cp /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi-signed/grubnetx64.efi.signed  \
        /tftpboot/grubx64.efi
    
    Fedora: (21 and later)
        sudo cp /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/shim.efi /tftpboot/bootx64.efi
        sudo cp /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi /tftpboot/grubx64.efi
    
    CentOS: (7 and later)
        sudo cp /boot/efi/EFI/centos/shim.efi /tftpboot/bootx64.efi
        sudo cp /boot/efi/EFI/centos/grubx64.efi /tftpboot/grubx64.efi
    
  5. Create master grub.cfg:

    Ubuntu: Create grub.cfg under ``/tftpboot/grub`` directory.
        GRUB_DIR=/tftpboot/grub
    
    Fedora: Create grub.cfg under ``/tftpboot/EFI/fedora`` directory.
         GRUB_DIR=/tftpboot/EFI/fedora
    
    CentOS: Create grub.cfg under ``/tftpboot/EFI/centos`` directory.
        GRUB_DIR=/tftpboot/EFI/centos
    
    Create directory GRUB_DIR
      sudo mkdir -p $GRUB_DIR
    

    This file is used to redirect grub to baremetal node specific config file. It redirects it to specific grub config file based on DHCP IP assigned to baremetal node.

    set default=master
    set timeout=5
    set hidden_timeout_quiet=false
    
    menuentry "master"  {
    configfile /tftpboot/$net_default_ip.conf
    }
    

    Change the permission of grub.cfg:

    sudo chmod 644 $GRUB_DIR/grub.cfg
    
  6. Update bootfile and template file configuration parameters for UEFI PXE boot in the Bare Metal Service’s configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf):

    [pxe]
    
    # Bootfile DHCP parameter for UEFI boot mode. (string value)
    uefi_pxe_bootfile_name=bootx64.efi
    
    # Template file for PXE configuration for UEFI boot loader.
    # (string value)
    uefi_pxe_config_template=$pybasedir/drivers/modules/pxe_grub_config.template
    
  7. Update the bare metal node with boot_mode capability in node’s properties field:

    ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities='boot_mode:uefi'
    
  8. Make sure that bare metal node is configured to boot in UEFI boot mode and boot device is set to network/pxe.

    NOTE: pxe_ilo driver supports automatic setting of UEFI boot mode and boot device on the bare metal node. So this step is not required for pxe_ilo driver.

For more information on configuring boot modes, refer boot_mode_support.

iPXE setup

An alternative to PXE boot, iPXE was introduced in the Juno release (2014.2.0) of Bare Metal service.

If you will be using iPXE to boot instead of PXE, iPXE needs to be set up on the Bare Metal service node(s) where ironic-conductor is running.

  1. Make sure these directories exist and can be written to by the user the ironic-conductor is running as. For example:

    sudo mkdir -p /tftpboot
    sudo mkdir -p /httpboot
    sudo chown -R ironic /tftpboot
    sudo chown -R ironic /httpboot
    
  2. Create a map file in the tftp boot directory (/tftpboot):

    echo 'r ^([^/]) /tftpboot/\1' > /tftpboot/map-file
    echo 'r ^(/tftpboot/) /tftpboot/\2' >> /tftpboot/map-file
    
  3. Set up TFTP and HTTP servers.

    These servers should be running and configured to use the local /tftpboot and /httpboot directories respectively, as their root directories. (Setting up these servers is outside the scope of this install guide.)

    These root directories need to be mounted locally to the ironic-conductor services, so that the services can access them.

    The Bare Metal service’s configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf) should be edited accordingly to specify the TFTP and HTTP root directories and server addresses. For example:

    [pxe]
    
    # Ironic compute node's tftp root path. (string value)
    tftp_root=/tftpboot
    
    # IP address of Ironic compute node's tftp server. (string
    # value)
    tftp_server=192.168.0.2
    
    [deploy]
    # Ironic compute node's http root path. (string value)
    http_root=/httpboot
    
    # Ironic compute node's HTTP server URL. Example:
    # http://192.1.2.3:8080 (string value)
    http_url=http://192.168.0.2:8080
    
  4. Install the iPXE package with the boot images:

    Ubuntu:
        apt-get install ipxe
    
    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        yum install ipxe-bootimgs
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
        dnf install ipxe-bootimgs
    
  5. Copy the iPXE boot image (undionly.kpxe for BIOS and ipxe.efi for UEFI) to /tftpboot. The binary might be found at:

    Ubuntu:
        cp /usr/lib/ipxe/{undionly.kpxe,ipxe.efi} /tftpboot
    
    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        cp /usr/share/ipxe/{undionly.kpxe,ipxe.efi} /tftpboot
    

    Note

    If the packaged version of the iPXE boot image doesn’t work, you can download a prebuilt one from http://boot.ipxe.org or build one image from source, see http://ipxe.org/download for more information.

  6. Enable/Configure iPXE in the Bare Metal Service’s configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf):

    [pxe]
    
    # Enable iPXE boot. (boolean value)
    ipxe_enabled=True
    
    # Neutron bootfile DHCP parameter. (string value)
    pxe_bootfile_name=undionly.kpxe
    
    # Bootfile DHCP parameter for UEFI boot mode. (string value)
    uefi_pxe_bootfile_name=ipxe.efi
    
    # Template file for PXE configuration. (string value)
    pxe_config_template=$pybasedir/drivers/modules/ipxe_config.template
    
    # Template file for PXE configuration for UEFI boot loader.
    # (string value)
    uefi_pxe_config_template=$pybasedir/drivers/modules/ipxe_config.template
    
  7. Restart the ironic-conductor process:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
      sudo systemctl restart openstack-ironic-conductor
    
    Ubuntu:
      sudo service ironic-conductor restart
    

Networking service configuration

DHCP requests from iPXE need to have a DHCP tag called ipxe, in order for the DHCP server to tell the client to get the boot.ipxe script via HTTP. Otherwise, if the tag isn’t there, the DHCP server will tell the DHCP client to chainload the iPXE image (undionly.kpxe). The Networking service needs to be configured to create this DHCP tag, since it isn’t created by default.

  1. Create a custom dnsmasq.conf file with a setting for the ipxe tag. For example, create the file /etc/dnsmasq-ironic.conf with the content:

    # Create the "ipxe" tag if request comes from iPXE user class
    dhcp-userclass=set:ipxe,iPXE
    
    # Alternatively, create the "ipxe" tag if request comes from DHCP option 175
    # dhcp-match=set:ipxe,175
    
  2. In the Networking service DHCP Agent configuration file (typically located at /etc/neutron/dhcp_agent.ini), set the custom /etc/dnsmasq-ironic.conf file as the dnsmasq configuration file:

    [DEFAULT]
    dnsmasq_config_file = /etc/dnsmasq-ironic.conf
    
  3. Restart the neutron-dhcp-agent process:

    service neutron-dhcp-agent restart
    

IPMI support

If using the IPMITool driver, the ipmitool command must be present on the service node(s) where ironic-conductor is running. On most distros, this is provided as part of the ipmitool package. Source code is available at http://ipmitool.sourceforge.net/

Note that certain distros, notably Mac OS X and SLES, install openipmi instead of ipmitool by default. THIS DRIVER IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH openipmi AS IT RELIES ON ERROR HANDLING OPTIONS NOT PROVIDED BY THIS TOOL.

Check that you can connect to and authenticate with the IPMI controller in your bare metal server by using ipmitool:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ip-address> -U <username> -P <password> chassis power status

<ip-address> = The IP of the IPMI controller you want to access

Note:

  1. This is not the bare metal node’s main IP. The IPMI controller should have its own unique IP.
  2. In case the above command doesn’t return the power status of the bare metal server, check for these:
    • ipmitool is installed.
    • The IPMI controller on your bare metal server is turned on.
    • The IPMI controller credentials passed in the command are right.
    • The conductor node has a route to the IPMI controller. This can be checked by just pinging the IPMI controller IP from the conductor node.

Note

If there are slow or unresponsive BMCs in the environment, the retry_timeout configuration option in the [ipmi] section may need to be lowered. The default is fairly conservative, as setting this timeout too low can cause older BMCs to crash and require a hard-reset.

Bare Metal service supports sending IPMI sensor data to Telemetry with pxe_ipmitool, pxe_ipminative, agent_ipmitool, agent_pyghmi, agent_ilo, iscsi_ilo, pxe_ilo, and with pxe_irmc driver starting from Kilo release. By default, support for sending IPMI sensor data to Telemetry is disabled. If you want to enable it, you should make the following two changes in ironic.conf:

  • notification_driver = messaging in the DEFAULT section
  • send_sensor_data = true in the conductor section

If you want to customize the sensor types which will be sent to Telemetry, change the send_sensor_data_types option. For example, the below settings will send temperature, fan, voltage and these three sensor types of data to Telemetry:

  • send_sensor_data_types=Temperature,Fan,Voltage

If we use default value ‘All’ for all the sensor types which are supported by Telemetry, they are:

  • Temperature, Fan, Voltage, Current

Configure node web console

The web console can be configured in Bare Metal service in the following way:

  • Install shellinabox in ironic conductor node. For RHEL/CentOS, shellinabox package is not present in base repositories, user must enable EPEL repository, you can find more from FedoraProject page.

    Installation example:

    Ubuntu:
        sudo apt-get install shellinabox
    
    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo yum install shellinabox
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
         sudo dnf install shellinabox
    

    You can find more about shellinabox on the shellinabox page.

    You can optionally use the SSL certificate in shellinabox. If you want to use the SSL certificate in shellinabox, you should install openssl and generate the SSL certificate.

    1. Install openssl, for example:

      Ubuntu:
           sudo apt-get install openssl
      
      Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
           sudo yum install openssl
      
      Fedora 22 or higher:
           sudo dnf install openssl
      
    2. Generate the SSL certificate, here is an example, you can find more about openssl on the openssl page:

      cd /tmp/ca
      openssl genrsa -des3 -out my.key 1024
      openssl req -new -key my.key  -out my.csr
      cp my.key my.key.org
      openssl rsa -in my.key.org -out my.key
      openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in my.csr -signkey my.key -out my.crt
      cat my.crt my.key > certificate.pem
      
  • Customize the console section in the Bare Metal service configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf), if you want to use SSL certificate in shellinabox, you should specify terminal_cert_dir. for example:

    [console]
    
    #
    # Options defined in ironic.drivers.modules.console_utils
    #
    
    # Path to serial console terminal program (string value)
    #terminal=shellinaboxd
    
    # Directory containing the terminal SSL cert(PEM) for serial
    # console access (string value)
    terminal_cert_dir=/tmp/ca
    
    # Directory for holding terminal pid files. If not specified,
    # the temporary directory will be used. (string value)
    #terminal_pid_dir=<None>
    
    # Time interval (in seconds) for checking the status of
    # console subprocess. (integer value)
    #subprocess_checking_interval=1
    
    # Time (in seconds) to wait for the console subprocess to
    # start. (integer value)
    #subprocess_timeout=10
    
  • Append console parameters for bare metal PXE boot in the Bare Metal service configuration file (/etc/ironic/ironic.conf), including right serial port terminal and serial speed, serial speed should be same serial configuration with BIOS settings, so that os boot process can be seen in web console, for example:

    pxe_* driver:
    
         [pxe]
    
         #Additional append parameters for bare metal PXE boot. (string value)
         pxe_append_params = nofb nomodeset vga=normal console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8
    
    agent_* driver:
    
         [agent]
    
         #Additional append parameters for bare metal PXE boot. (string value)
         agent_pxe_append_params = nofb nomodeset vga=normal console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8
    
  • Configure node web console.

    Enable the web console, for example:

    ironic node-update <node-uuid> add driver_info/<terminal_port>=<customized_port>
    ironic node-set-console-mode <node-uuid> true
    

    Check whether the console is enabled, for example:

    ironic node-validate <node-uuid>
    

    Disable the web console, for example:

    ironic node-set-console-mode <node-uuid> false
    ironic node-update <node-uuid> remove driver_info/<terminal_port>
    

    The <terminal_port> is driver dependent. The actual name of this field can be checked in driver properties, for example:

    ironic driver-properties <driver>
    

    For *_ipmitool and *_ipminative drivers, this option is ipmi_terminal_port. For seamicro driver, this option is seamicro_terminal_port. Give a customized port number to <customized_port>, for example 8023, this customized port is used in web console url.

  • Get web console information:

    ironic node-get-console <node-uuid>
    +-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Property        | Value                                                                |
    +-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | console_enabled | True                                                                 |
    | console_info    | {u'url': u'http://<url>:<customized_port>', u'type': u'shellinabox'} |
    +-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
    

    You can open web console using above url through web browser. If console_enabled is false, console_info is None, web console is disabled. If you want to launch web console, refer to Enable web console part.

Boot mode support

The following drivers support setting of boot mode (Legacy BIOS or UEFI).

  • pxe_ipmitool

The boot modes can be configured in Bare Metal service in the following way:

  • When no boot mode setting is provided, these drivers default the boot_mode to Legacy BIOS.

  • Only one boot mode (either uefi or bios) can be configured for the node.

  • If the operator wants a node to boot always in uefi mode or bios mode, then they may use capabilities parameter within properties field of an bare metal node. The operator must manually set the appropriate boot mode on the bare metal node.

    To configure a node in uefi mode, then set capabilities as below:

    ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities='boot_mode:uefi'
    

    Nodes having boot_mode set to uefi may be requested by adding an extra_spec to the Compute service flavor:

    nova flavor-key ironic-test-3 set capabilities:boot_mode="uefi"
    nova boot --flavor ironic-test-3 --image test-image instance-1
    

    If capabilities is used in extra_spec as above, nova scheduler (ComputeCapabilitiesFilter) will match only bare metal nodes which have the boot_mode set appropriately in properties/capabilities. It will filter out rest of the nodes.

    The above facility for matching in the Compute service can be used in heterogeneous environments where there is a mix of uefi and bios machines, and operator wants to provide a choice to the user regarding boot modes. If the flavor doesn’t contain boot_mode and boot_mode is configured for bare metal nodes, then nova scheduler will consider all nodes and user may get either bios or uefi machine.

Choosing the disk label

Note

The term disk label is historically used in Ironic and was taken from parted. Apparently everyone seems to have a different word for disk label - these are all the same thing: disk type, partition table, partition map and so on...

Ironic allows operators to choose which disk label they want their bare metal node to be deployed with when Ironic is responsible for partitioning the disk; therefore choosing the disk label does not apply when the image being deployed is a whole disk image.

There are some edge cases where someone may want to choose a specific disk label for the images being deployed, including but not limited to:

  • For machines in bios boot mode with disks larger than 2 terabytes it’s recommended to use a gpt disk label. That’s because a capacity beyond 2 terabytes is not addressable by using the MBR partitioning type. But, although GPT claims to be backward compatible with legacy BIOS systems that’s not always the case.
  • Operators may want to force the partitioning to be always MBR (even if the machine is deployed with boot mode uefi) to avoid breakage of applications and tools running on those instances.

The disk label can be configured in two ways; when Ironic is used with the Compute service or in standalone mode. The following bullet points and sections will describe both methods:

  • When no disk label is provided Ironic will configure it according to the boot mode; bios boot mode will use msdos and uefi boot mode will use gpt.
  • Only one disk label - either msdos or gpt - can be configured for the node.

When used with Compute service

When Ironic is used with the Compute service the disk label should be set to node’s properties/capabilities field and also to the flavor which will request such capability, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities='disk_label:gpt'

As for the flavor:

nova flavor-key baremetal set capabilities:disk_label="gpt"

When used in standalone mode

When used without the Compute service, the disk label should be set directly to the node’s instance_info field, as below:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add instance_info/capabilities='{"disk_label": "gpt"}'

Local boot with partition images

Starting with the Kilo release, Bare Metal service supports local boot with partition images, meaning that after the deployment the node’s subsequent reboots won’t happen via PXE or Virtual Media. Instead, it will boot from a local boot loader installed on the disk.

It’s important to note that in order for this to work the image being deployed with Bare Metal serivce must contain grub2 installed within it.

Enabling the local boot is different when Bare Metal service is used with Compute service and without it. The following sections will describe both methods.

Note

The local boot feature is dependent upon a updated deploy ramdisk built with diskimage-builder version >= 0.1.42 or ironic-python-agent in the kilo-era.

Enabling local boot with Compute service

To enable local boot we need to set a capability on the bare metal node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities="boot_option:local"

Nodes having boot_option set to local may be requested by adding an extra_spec to the Compute service flavor, for example:

nova flavor-key baremetal set capabilities:boot_option="local"

Note

If the node is configured to use UEFI, Bare Metal service will create an EFI partition on the disk and switch the partition table format to gpt. The EFI partition will be used later by the boot loader (which is installed from the deploy ramdisk).

Enabling local boot without Compute

Since adding capabilities to the node’s properties is only used by the nova scheduler to perform more advanced scheduling of instances, we need a way to enable local boot when Compute is not present. To do that we can simply specify the capability via the instance_info attribute of the node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add instance_info/capabilities='{"boot_option": "local"}'

Enrollment

After all the services have been properly configured, you should enroll your hardware with the Bare Metal service, and confirm that the Compute service sees the available hardware. The nodes will be visible to the Compute service once they are in the available provision state.

Note

After enrolling nodes with the Bare Metal service, the Compute service will not be immediately notified of the new resources. The Compute service’s resource tracker syncs periodically, and so any changes made directly to the Bare Metal service’s resources will become visible in the Compute service only after the next run of that periodic task. More information is in the Troubleshooting section below.

Note

Any bare metal node that is visible to the Compute service may have a workload scheduled to it, if both the power and deploy interfaces pass the validate check. If you wish to exclude a node from the Compute service’s scheduler, for instance so that you can perform maintenance on it, you can set the node to “maintenance” mode. For more information see the Maintenance Mode section below.

Enrollment process

This section describes the main steps to enroll a node and make it available for provisioning. Some steps are shown separately for illustration purposes, and may be combined if desired.

  1. Create a node in the Bare Metal service. At a minimum, you must specify the driver name (for example, “pxe_ipmitool”). This will return the node UUID along with other information about the node. The node’s provision state will be available. (The example assumes that the client is using the default API version.):

    ironic node-create -d pxe_ipmitool
    +--------------+--------------------------------------+
    | Property     | Value                                |
    +--------------+--------------------------------------+
    | uuid         | dfc6189f-ad83-4261-9bda-b27258eb1987 |
    | driver_info  | {}                                   |
    | extra        | {}                                   |
    | driver       | pxe_ipmitool                         |
    | chassis_uuid |                                      |
    | properties   | {}                                   |
    | name         | None                                 |
    +--------------+--------------------------------------+
    
    ironic node-show dfc6189f-ad83-4261-9bda-b27258eb1987
    +------------------------+--------------------------------------+
    | Property               | Value                                |
    +------------------------+--------------------------------------+
    | target_power_state     | None                                 |
    | extra                  | {}                                   |
    | last_error             | None                                 |
    | maintenance_reason     | None                                 |
    | provision_state        | available                            |
    | uuid                   | dfc6189f-ad83-4261-9bda-b27258eb1987 |
    | console_enabled        | False                                |
    | target_provision_state | None                                 |
    | provision_updated_at   | None                                 |
    | maintenance            | False                                |
    | power_state            | None                                 |
    | driver                 | pxe_ipmitool                         |
    | properties             | {}                                   |
    | instance_uuid          | None                                 |
    | name                   | None                                 |
    | driver_info            | {}                                   |
    | ...                    | ...                                  |
    +------------------------+--------------------------------------+
    

    Beginning with the Kilo release a node may also be referred to by a logical name as well as its UUID. To utilize this new feature a name must be assigned to the node. This can be done when the node is created by adding the -n option to the node-create command or by updating an existing node with the node-update command. See Logical Names for examples.

    Beginning with the Liberty release, with API version 1.11 and above, a newly created node will have an initial provision state of enroll as opposed to available. See Enrolling a node for more details.

  2. Update the node driver_info so that Bare Metal service can manage the node. Different drivers may require different information about the node. You can determine this with the driver-properties command, as follows:

    ironic driver-properties pxe_ipmitool
    +----------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Property             | Description                                                                                                 |
    +----------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | ipmi_address         | IP address or hostname of the node. Required.                                                               |
    | ipmi_password        | password. Optional.                                                                                         |
    | ipmi_username        | username; default is NULL user. Optional.                                                                   |
    | ...                  | ...                                                                                                         |
    | deploy_kernel        | UUID (from Glance) of the deployment kernel. Required.                                                      |
    | deploy_ramdisk       | UUID (from Glance) of the ramdisk that is mounted at boot time. Required.                                   |
    +----------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    
    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add \
    driver_info/ipmi_username=$USER \
    driver_info/ipmi_password=$PASS \
    driver_info/ipmi_address=$ADDRESS
    

    Note

    If IPMI is running on a port other than 623 (the default). The port must be added to driver_info by specifying the ipmi_port value. Example:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add driver_info/ipmi_port=$PORT_NUMBER
    

    Note that you may also specify all driver_info parameters during node-create by passing the -i option multiple times.

  3. Update the node’s properties to match the bare metal flavor you created earlier:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add \
    properties/cpus=$CPU \
    properties/memory_mb=$RAM_MB \
    properties/local_gb=$DISK_GB \
    properties/cpu_arch=$ARCH
    

    As above, these can also be specified at node creation by passing the -p option to node-create multiple times.

  4. If you wish to perform more advanced scheduling of the instances based on hardware capabilities, you may add metadata to each node that will be exposed to the nova scheduler (see: ComputeCapabilitiesFilter). A full explanation of this is outside of the scope of this document. It can be done through the special capabilities member of node properties:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add \
    properties/capabilities=key1:val1,key2:val2
    
  5. As mentioned in the Flavor Creation section, if using the Kilo or later release of Bare Metal service, you should specify a deploy kernel and ramdisk which correspond to the node’s driver, for example:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add \
    driver_info/deploy_kernel=$DEPLOY_VMLINUZ_UUID \
    driver_info/deploy_ramdisk=$DEPLOY_INITRD_UUID
    
  6. You must also inform Bare Metal service of the network interface cards which are part of the node by creating a port with each NIC’s MAC address. These MAC addresses are passed to the Networking service during instance provisioning and used to configure the network appropriately:

    ironic port-create -n $NODE_UUID -a $MAC_ADDRESS
    
  7. To check if Bare Metal service has the minimum information necessary for a node’s driver to function, you may validate it:

    ironic node-validate $NODE_UUID
    
    +------------+--------+--------+
    | Interface  | Result | Reason |
    +------------+--------+--------+
    | console    | True   |        |
    | deploy     | True   |        |
    | management | True   |        |
    | power      | True   |        |
    +------------+--------+--------+
    

    If the node fails validation, each driver will return information as to why it failed:

    ironic node-validate $NODE_UUID
    
    +------------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Interface  | Result | Reason                                                                                                                              |
    +------------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | console    | None   | not supported                                                                                                                       |
    | deploy     | False  | Cannot validate iSCSI deploy. Some parameters were missing in node's instance_info. Missing are: ['root_gb', 'image_source']        |
    | management | False  | Missing the following IPMI credentials in node's driver_info: ['ipmi_address'].                                                     |
    | power      | False  | Missing the following IPMI credentials in node's driver_info: ['ipmi_address'].                                                     |
    +------------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    
  8. If using API version 1.11 or above, the node was created in the enroll provision state. In order for the node to be available for deploying a workload (for example, by the Compute service), it needs to be in the available provision state. To do this, it must be moved into the manageable state and then moved into the available state. The API version 1.11 and above section describes the commands for this.

Enrolling a node

In the Liberty cycle, starting with API version 1.11, the Bare Metal service added a new initial provision state of enroll to its state machine.

Existing automation tooling that use an API version lower than 1.11 are not affected, since the initial provision state is still available. However, using API version 1.11 or above may break existing automation tooling with respect to node creation.

The default API version used by (the most recent) python-ironicclient is 1.9.

The examples below set the API version for each command. To set the API version for all commands, you can set the environment variable IRONIC_API_VERSION.

API version 1.10 and below

Below is an example of creating a node with API version 1.10. After creation, the node will be in the available provision state. Other API versions below 1.10 may be substituted in place of 1.10.

ironic --ironic-api-version 1.10 node-create -d agent_ilo -n pre11

+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property     | Value                                |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| uuid         | cc4998a0-f726-4927-9473-0582458c6789 |
| driver_info  | {}                                   |
| extra        | {}                                   |
| driver       | agent_ilo                            |
| chassis_uuid |                                      |
| properties   | {}                                   |
| name         | pre11                                |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+


ironic --ironic-api-version 1.10 node-list

+--------------------------------------+-------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| UUID                                 | Name  | Instance UUID | Power State | Provisioning State | Maintenance |
+--------------------------------------+-------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| cc4998a0-f726-4927-9473-0582458c6789 | pre11 | None          | None        | available          | False       |
+--------------------------------------+-------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+

API version 1.11 and above

Beginning with API version 1.11, the initial provision state for newly created nodes is enroll. In the examples below, other API versions above 1.11 may be substituted in place of 1.11.

ironic --ironic-api-version 1.11 node-create -d agent_ilo -n post11

+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property     | Value                                |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| uuid         | 0eb013bb-1e4b-4f4c-94b5-2e7468242611 |
| driver_info  | {}                                   |
| extra        | {}                                   |
| driver       | agent_ilo                            |
| chassis_uuid |                                      |
| properties   | {}                                   |
| name         | post11                               |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+


ironic --ironic-api-version 1.11 node-list

+--------------------------------------+--------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| UUID                                 | Name   | Instance UUID | Power State | Provisioning State | Maintenance |
+--------------------------------------+--------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| 0eb013bb-1e4b-4f4c-94b5-2e7468242611 | post11 | None          | None        | enroll             | False       |
+--------------------------------------+--------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+

In order for nodes to be available for deploying workloads on them, nodes must be in the available provision state. To do this, nodes created with API version 1.11 and above must be moved from the enroll state to the manageable state and then to the available state.

To move a node to a different provision state, use the node-set-provision-state command.

Note

Since it is an asychronous call, the response for ironic node-set-provision-state will not indicate whether the transition succeeded or not. You can check the status of the operation via ironic node-show. If it was successful, provision_state will be in the desired state. If it failed, there will be information in the node’s last_error.

After creating a node and before moving it from its initial provision state of enroll, basic power and port information needs to be configured on the node. The Bare Metal service needs this information because it verifies that it is capable of controlling the node when transitioning the node from enroll to manageable state.

To move a node from enroll to manageable provision state:

ironic --ironic-api-version 1.11 node-set-provision-state $NODE_UUID manage

ironic node-show $NODE_UUID

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Property               | Value                                                              |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ...                    | ...                                                                |
| provision_state        | manageable                                                         | <- verify correct state
| uuid                   | 0eb013bb-1e4b-4f4c-94b5-2e7468242611                               |
| ...                    | ...                                                                |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

When a node is moved from the manageable to available provision state, the node will go through automated cleaning if configured to do so (see Configure the Bare Metal service for cleaning). To move a node from manageable to available provision state:

ironic --ironic-api-version 1.11 node-set-provision-state $NODE_UUID provide

ironic node-show $NODE_UUID

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Property               | Value                                                              |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ...                    | ...                                                                |
| provision_state        | available                                                          | < - verify correct state
| uuid                   | 0eb013bb-1e4b-4f4c-94b5-2e7468242611                               |
| ...                    | ...                                                                |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

For more details on the Bare Metal service’s state machine, see the state machine documentation.

Logical names

Beginning with the Kilo release a Node may also be referred to by a logical name as well as its UUID. Names can be assigned either when creating the node by adding the -n option to the node-create command or by updating an existing node with the node-update command.

Node names must be unique, and conform to:

The node is named ‘example’ in the following examples:

ironic node-create -d agent_ipmitool -n example

or:

ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add name=example

Once assigned a logical name, a node can then be referred to by name or UUID interchangeably.

ironic node-create -d agent_ipmitool -n example

+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property     | Value                                |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+
| uuid         | 71e01002-8662-434d-aafd-f068f69bb85e |
| driver_info  | {}                                   |
| extra        | {}                                   |
| driver       | agent_ipmitool                       |
| chassis_uuid |                                      |
| properties   | {}                                   |
| name         | example                              |
+--------------+--------------------------------------+


ironic node-show example

+------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property               | Value                                |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| target_power_state     | None                                 |
| extra                  | {}                                   |
| last_error             | None                                 |
| updated_at             | 2015-04-24T16:23:46+00:00            |
| ...                    | ...                                  |
| instance_info          | {}                                   |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------+

Hardware Inspection

Starting with the Kilo release, Bare Metal service supports hardware inspection that simplifies enrolling nodes. Inspection allows Bare Metal service to discover required node properties once required driver_info fields (for example, IPMI credentials) are set by an operator. Inspection will also create the Bare Metal service ports for the discovered ethernet MACs. Operators will have to manually delete the Bare Metal service ports for which physical media is not connected. This is required due to the bug 1405131.

There are two kinds of inspection supported by Bare Metal service:

  1. Out-of-band inspection is currently implemented by iLO drivers, listed at iLO drivers.

  2. In-band inspection is performed by utilizing the ironic-inspector project. This is supported by the following drivers:

    pxe_drac
    pxe_ipmitool
    pxe_ipminative
    pxe_ssh
    

This feature needs to be explicitly enabled in the configuration by setting enabled = True in [inspector] section. You must additionally install python-ironic-inspector-client to use this functionality. You must set service_url if the ironic-inspector service is being run on a separate host from the ironic-conductor service, or is using non-standard port.

In order to ensure that ports in Bare Metal service are synchronized with NIC ports on the node, the following settings in the ironic-inspector configuration file must be set:

[processing]
add_ports = all
keep_ports = present

Note

During Kilo cycle we used on older verions of Inspector called ironic-discoverd. Inspector is expected to be a mostly drop-in replacement, and the same client library should be used to connect to both.

For Kilo, install ironic-discoverd of version 1.1.0 or higher instead of python-ironic-inspector-client and use [discoverd] option group in both Bare Metal service and ironic-discoverd configuration files instead of ones provided above.

Inspection can be initiated using node-set-provision-state. The node should be in MANAGEABLE state before inspection is initiated.

  • Move node to manageable state:

    ironic node-set-provision-state <node_UUID> manage
    
  • Initiate inspection:

    ironic node-set-provision-state <node_UUID> inspect
    

Note

The above commands require the python-ironicclient to be version 0.5.0 or greater.

Specifying the disk for deployment

Starting with the Kilo release, Bare Metal service supports passing hints to the deploy ramdisk about which disk it should pick for the deployment. The list of support hints is:

  • model (STRING): device identifier

  • vendor (STRING): device vendor

  • serial (STRING): disk serial number

  • size (INT): size of the device in GiB

    Note

    A node’s ‘local_gb’ property is often set to a value 1 GiB less than the actual disk size to account for partitioning (this is how DevStack, TripleO and Ironic Inspector work, to name a few). However, in this case size should be the actual size. For example, for a 128 GiB disk local_gb will be 127, but size hint will be 128.

  • wwn (STRING): unique storage identifier

  • wwn_with_extension (STRING): unique storage identifier with the vendor extension appended

  • wwn_vendor_extension (STRING): unique vendor storage identifier

  • name (STRING): the device name, e.g /dev/md0

    Warning

    The root device hint name should only be used for devices with constant names (e.g RAID volumes). For SATA, SCSI and IDE disk controllers this hint is not recommended because the order in which the device nodes are added in Linux is arbitrary, resulting in devices like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb switching around at boot time.

To associate one or more hints with a node, update the node’s properties with a root_device key, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/root_device='{"wwn": "0x4000cca77fc4dba1"}'

That will guarantee that Bare Metal service will pick the disk device that has the wwn equal to the specified wwn value, or fail the deployment if it can not be found.

Note

If multiple hints are specified, a device must satisfy all the hints.

Enabling HTTPS in Swift

The drivers using virtual media use swift for storing boot images and node configuration information (contains sensitive information for Ironic conductor to provision bare metal hardware). By default, HTTPS is not enabled in swift. HTTPS is required to encrypt all communication between swift and Ironic conductor and swift and bare metal (via virtual media). It can be enabled in one of the following ways:

Using Bare Metal service as a standalone service

Starting with the Kilo release, it’s possible to use Bare Metal service without other OpenStack services.

You should make the following changes to /etc/ironic/ironic.conf:

  1. To disable usage of Identity service tokens:

    [DEFAULT]
    ...
    auth_strategy=none
    
  2. If you want to disable the Networking service, you should have your network pre-configured to serve DHCP and TFTP for machines that you’re deploying. To disable it, change the following lines:

    [dhcp]
    ...
    dhcp_provider=none
    

    Note

    If you disabled the Networking service and the driver that you use is supported by at most one conductor, PXE boot will still work for your nodes without any manual config editing. This is because you know all the DHCP options that will be used for deployment and can set up your DHCP server appropriately.

    If you have multiple conductors per driver, it would be better to use Networking since it will do all the dynamically changing configurations for you.

If you don’t use Image service, it’s possible to provide images to Bare Metal service via hrefs.

Note

At the moment, only two types of hrefs are acceptable instead of Image service UUIDs: HTTP(S) hrefs (for example, “http://my.server.net/images/img”) and file hrefs (file:///images/img).

There are however some limitations for different drivers:

  • If you’re using one of the drivers that use agent deploy method (namely, agent_ilo, agent_ipmitool, agent_pyghmi, agent_ssh or agent_vbox) you have to know MD5 checksum for your instance image. To compute it, you can use the following command:

    md5sum image.qcow2
    ed82def8730f394fb85aef8a208635f6  image.qcow2
    

    Apart from that, because of the way the agent deploy method works, image hrefs can use only HTTP(S) protocol.

  • If you’re using iscsi_ilo or agent_ilo driver, Object Storage service is required, as these drivers need to store floppy image that is used to pass parameters to deployment iso. For this method also only HTTP(S) hrefs are acceptable, as HP iLO servers cannot attach other types of hrefs as virtual media.

  • Other drivers use PXE deploy method and there are no special requirements in this case.

Steps to start a deployment are pretty similar to those when using Compute:

  1. To use the ironic CLI, set up these environment variables. Since no authentication strategy is being used, the value can be any string for OS_AUTH_TOKEN. IRONIC_URL is the URL of the ironic-api process. For example:

    export OS_AUTH_TOKEN=fake-token
    export IRONIC_URL=http://localhost:6385/
    
  2. Create a node in Bare Metal service. At minimum, you must specify the driver name (for example, “pxe_ipmitool”). You can also specify all the required driver parameters in one command. This will return the node UUID:

    ironic node-create -d pxe_ipmitool -i ipmi_address=ipmi.server.net \
    -i ipmi_username=user -i ipmi_password=pass \
    -i deploy_kernel=file:///images/deploy.vmlinuz \
    -i deploy_ramdisk=http://my.server.net/images/deploy.ramdisk
    
    +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Property     | Value                                                                    |
    +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | uuid         | be94df40-b80a-4f63-b92b-e9368ee8d14c                                     |
    | driver_info  | {u'deploy_ramdisk': u'http://my.server.net/images/deploy.ramdisk',       |
    |              | u'deploy_kernel': u'file:///images/deploy.vmlinuz', u'ipmi_address':     |
    |              | u'ipmi.server.net', u'ipmi_username': u'user', u'ipmi_password':         |
    |              | u'******'}                                                               |
    | extra        | {}                                                                       |
    | driver       | pxe_ipmitool                                                             |
    | chassis_uuid |                                                                          |
    | properties   | {}                                                                       |
    +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    

    Note that here deploy_kernel and deploy_ramdisk contain links to images instead of Image service UUIDs.

  3. As in case of Compute service, you can also provide capabilities to node properties, but they will be used only by Bare Metal service (for example, boot mode). Although you don’t need to add properties like memory_mb, cpus etc. as Bare Metal service will require UUID of a node you’re going to deploy.

  4. Then create a port to inform Bare Metal service of the network interface cards which are part of the node by creating a port with each NIC’s MAC address. In this case, they’re used for naming of PXE configs for a node:

    ironic port-create -n $NODE_UUID -a $MAC_ADDRESS
    
  5. As there is no Compute service flavor and instance image is not provided with nova boot command, you also need to specify some fields in instance_info. For PXE deployment, they are image_source, kernel, ramdisk, root_gb:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add instance_info/image_source=$IMG \
    instance_info/kernel=$KERNEL instance_info/ramdisk=$RAMDISK \
    instance_info/root_gb=10
    

    Here $IMG, $KERNEL, $RAMDISK can also be HTTP(S) or file hrefs. For agent drivers, you don’t need to specify kernel and ramdisk, but MD5 checksum of instance image is required:

    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add instance_info/image_checksum=$MD5HASH
    
  6. Validate that all parameters are correct:

    ironic node-validate $NODE_UUID
    
    +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Interface  | Result | Reason                                                         |
    +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
    | console    | False  | Missing 'ipmi_terminal_port' parameter in node's driver_info.  |
    | deploy     | True   |                                                                |
    | management | True   |                                                                |
    | power      | True   |                                                                |
    +------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
    
  7. Now you can start the deployment, run:

    ironic node-set-provision-state $NODE_UUID active
    

    You can manage provisioning by issuing this command. Valid provision states are active, rebuild and deleted.

For iLO drivers, fields that should be provided are:

  • ilo_deploy_iso under driver_info;
  • ilo_boot_iso, image_source, root_gb under instance_info.

Note

Before Liberty release Ironic was not able to track non-Glance images’ content changes. Starting with Liberty, it is possible to do so using image modification date. For example, for HTTP image, if ‘Last-Modified’ header value from response to a HEAD request to “http://my.server.net/images/deploy.ramdisk” is greater than cached image modification time, Ironic will re-download the content. For “file://” images, the file system modification time is used.

Enabling the configuration drive (configdrive)

Starting with the Kilo release, the Bare Metal service supports exposing a configuration drive image to the instances.

The configuration drive is usually used in conjunction with the Compute service, but the Bare Metal service also offers a standalone way of using it. The following sections will describe both methods.

When used with Compute service

To enable the configuration drive when deploying an instance, pass --config-drive true parameter to the nova boot command, for example:

nova boot --config-drive true --flavor baremetal --image test-image instance-1

It’s also possible to enable the configuration drive automatically on all instances by configuring the OpenStack Compute service to always create a configuration drive by setting the following option in the /etc/nova/nova.conf file, for example:

[DEFAULT]
...

force_config_drive=True

When used standalone

When used without the Compute service, the operator needs to create a configuration drive and provide the file or HTTP URL to the Bare Metal service.

For the format of the configuration drive, Bare Metal service expects a gzipped and base64 encoded ISO 9660 [*] file with a config-2 label. The ironic client can generate a configuration drive in the expected format. Just pass a directory path containing the files that will be injected into it via the --config-drive parameter of the node-set-provision-state command, for example:

ironic node-set-provision-state --config-drive /dir/configdrive_files $node_identifier active

Accessing the configuration drive data

When the configuration drive is enabled, the Bare Metal service will create a partition on the instance disk and write the configuration drive image onto it. The configuration drive must be mounted before use. This is performed automatically by many tools, such as cloud-init and cloudbase-init. To mount it manually on a Linux distribution that supports accessing devices by labels, simply run the following:

mkdir -p /mnt/config
mount /dev/disk/by-label/config-2 /mnt/config

If the guest OS doesn’t support accessing devices by labels, you can use other tools such as blkid to identify which device corresponds to the configuration drive and mount it, for example:

CONFIG_DEV=$(blkid -t LABEL="config-2" -odevice)
mkdir -p /mnt/config
mount $CONFIG_DEV /mnt/config
[*]A config drive could also be a data block with a VFAT filesystem on it instead of ISO 9660. But it’s unlikely that it would be needed since ISO 9660 is widely supported across operating systems.

Cloud-init integration

The configuration drive can be especially useful when used with cloud-init, but in order to use it we should follow some rules:

  • Cloud-init data should be organized in the expected format.

  • Since the Bare Metal service uses a disk partition as the configuration drive, it will only work with cloud-init version >= 0.7.5.

  • Cloud-init has a collection of data source modules, so when building the image with disk-image-builder we have to define DIB_CLOUD_INIT_DATASOURCES environment variable and set the appropriate sources to enable the configuration drive, for example:

    DIB_CLOUD_INIT_DATASOURCES="ConfigDrive, OpenStack" disk-image-create -o fedora-cloud-image fedora baremetal
    

    For more information see how to configure cloud-init data sources.

Building or downloading a deploy ramdisk image

Ironic depends on having an image with the ironic-python-agent (IPA) service running on it for controlling and deploying bare metal nodes.

You can download a pre-built version of the deploy ramdisk built with the CoreOS tools at:

Building from source

There are two known methods for creating the deployment image with the IPA service:

CoreOS tools

  1. Clone the ironic-python-agent project:

    git clone https://github.com/openstack/ironic-python-agent
    
  2. Install the requirements:

    Fedora 21/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo yum install docker gzip util-linux cpio findutils grep gpg
    
    Fedora 22 or higher:
        sudo dnf install docker gzip util-linux cpio findutils grep gpg
    
    Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) or higher:
        sudo apt-get install docker.io gzip uuid-runtime cpio findutils grep gnupg
    
  3. Change directory to imagebuild/coreos:

    cd ironic-python-agent/imagebuild/coreos
    
  4. Start the docker daemon:

    Fedora/RHEL7/CentOS7:
        sudo systemctl start docker
    
    Ubuntu:
        sudo service docker start
    
  5. Create the image:

    sudo make
    
  6. Or, create an ISO image to boot with virtual media:

    sudo make iso
    

Note

Once built the deploy ramdisk and kernel will appear inside of a directory called UPLOAD.

disk-image-builder

  1. Install disk-image-builder from pip or from your distro’s packages:

    sudo pip install diskimage-builder
    
  2. Create the image:

    disk-image-create ironic-agent fedora -o ironic-deploy
    

    The above command creates the deploy ramdisk and kernel named ironic-deploy.vmlinuz and ironic-deploy.initramfs in your current directory.

  3. Or, create an ISO image to boot with virtual media:

    disk-image-create ironic-agent fedora iso -o ironic-deploy
    

    The above command creates the deploy ISO named ironic-deploy.iso in your current directory.

Note

Fedora was used as an example for the base operational system. Please check the diskimage-builder documentation for other supported operational systems.

Trusted boot with partition image

Starting with the Liberty release, Ironic supports trusted boot with partition image. This means at the end of the deployment process, when the node is rebooted with the new user image, trusted boot will be performed. It will measure the node’s BIOS, boot loader, Option ROM and the Kernel/Ramdisk, to determine whether a bare metal node deployed by Ironic should be trusted.

It’s important to note that in order for this to work the node being deployed must have Intel TXT hardware support. The image being deployed with Ironic must have oat-client installed within it.

The following will describe how to enable trusted boot and boot with PXE and Nova:

  1. Create a customized user image with oat-client installed:

    disk-image-create -u fedora baremetal oat-client -o $TRUST_IMG
    

    For more information on creating customized images, see ImageRequirement.

  2. Enable VT-x, VT-d, TXT and TPM on the node. This can be done manually through the BIOS. Depending on the platform, several reboots may be needed.

  3. Enroll the node and update the node capability value:

    ironic node-create -d pxe_ipmitool
    
    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add properties/capabilities={'trusted_boot':true}
    
  4. Create a special flavor:

    nova flavor-key $TRUST_FLAVOR_UUID set 'capabilities:trusted_boot'=true
    
  5. Prepare tboot and mboot.c32 and put them into tftp_root or http_root directory on all nodes with the ironic-conductor processes:

    Ubuntu:
        cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mboot.c32 /tftpboot/
    
    Fedora:
        cp /usr/share/syslinux/mboot.c32 /tftpboot/
    

    Note: The actual location of mboot.c32 varies among different distribution versions.

    tboot can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/tboot/files/latest/download

  6. Install an OAT Server. An OAT Server should be running and configured correctly.

  7. Boot an instance with Nova:

    nova boot --flavor $TRUST_FLAVOR_UUID --image $TRUST_IMG --user-data $TRUST_SCRIPT trusted_instance
    

    Note that the node will be measured during trusted boot and the hash values saved into TPM. An example of TRUST_SCRIPT can be found in trust script example.

  8. Verify the result via OAT Server.

    This is outside the scope of Ironic. At the moment, users can manually verify the result by following the manual verify steps.

Troubleshooting

Once all the services are running and configured properly, and a node has been enrolled with the Bare Metal service and is in the available provision state, the Compute service should detect the node as an available resource and expose it to the scheduler.

Note

There is a delay, and it may take up to a minute (one periodic task cycle) for the Compute service to recognize any changes in the Bare Metal service’s resources (both additions and deletions).

In addition to watching nova-compute log files, you can see the available resources by looking at the list of Compute hypervisors. The resources reported therein should match the bare metal node properties, and the Compute service flavor.

Here is an example set of commands to compare the resources in Compute service and Bare Metal service:

$ ironic node-list
+--------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| UUID                                 | Instance UUID | Power State | Provisioning State | Maintenance |
+--------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| 86a2b1bb-8b29-4964-a817-f90031debddb | None          | power off   | available          | False       |
+--------------------------------------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+

$ ironic node-show 86a2b1bb-8b29-4964-a817-f90031debddb
+------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Property               | Value                                                                |
+------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| instance_uuid          | None                                                                 |
| properties             | {u'memory_mb': u'1024', u'cpu_arch': u'x86_64', u'local_gb': u'10',  |
|                        | u'cpus': u'1'}                                                       |
| maintenance            | False                                                                |
| driver_info            | { [SNIP] }                                                           |
| extra                  | {}                                                                   |
| last_error             | None                                                                 |
| created_at             | 2014-11-20T23:57:03+00:00                                            |
| target_provision_state | None                                                                 |
| driver                 | pxe_ipmitool                                                         |
| updated_at             | 2014-11-21T00:47:34+00:00                                            |
| instance_info          | {}                                                                   |
| chassis_uuid           | 7b49bbc5-2eb7-4269-b6ea-3f1a51448a59                                 |
| provision_state        | available                                                            |
| reservation            | None                                                                 |
| power_state            | power off                                                            |
| console_enabled        | False                                                                |
| uuid                   | 86a2b1bb-8b29-4964-a817-f90031debddb                                 |
+------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

$ nova hypervisor-show 1
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property                | Value                                |
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| cpu_info                | baremetal cpu                        |
| current_workload        | 0                                    |
| disk_available_least    | -                                    |
| free_disk_gb            | 10                                   |
| free_ram_mb             | 1024                                 |
| host_ip                 | [ SNIP ]                             |
| hypervisor_hostname     | 86a2b1bb-8b29-4964-a817-f90031debddb |
| hypervisor_type         | ironic                               |
| hypervisor_version      | 1                                    |
| id                      | 1                                    |
| local_gb                | 10                                   |
| local_gb_used           | 0                                    |
| memory_mb               | 1024                                 |
| memory_mb_used          | 0                                    |
| running_vms             | 0                                    |
| service_disabled_reason | -                                    |
| service_host            | my-test-host                         |
| service_id              | 6                                    |
| state                   | up                                   |
| status                  | enabled                              |
| vcpus                   | 1                                    |
| vcpus_used              | 0                                    |
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+

Maintenance mode

Maintenance mode may be used if you need to take a node out of the resource pool. Putting a node in maintenance mode will prevent Bare Metal service from executing periodic tasks associated with the node. This will also prevent Compute service from placing a tenant instance on the node by not exposing the node to the nova scheduler. Nodes can be placed into maintenance mode with the following command.

$ ironic node-set-maintenance $NODE_UUID on

As of the Kilo release, a maintenance reason may be included with the optional --reason command line option. This is a free form text field that will be displayed in the maintenance_reason section of the node-show command.

$ ironic node-set-maintenance $UUID on --reason "Need to add ram."

$ ironic node-show $UUID

+------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Property               | Value                                |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| target_power_state     | None                                 |
| extra                  | {}                                   |
| last_error             | None                                 |
| updated_at             | 2015-04-27T15:43:58+00:00            |
| maintenance_reason     | Need to add ram.                     |
| ...                    | ...                                  |
| maintenance            | True                                 |
| ...                    | ...                                  |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------+

To remove maintenance mode and clear any maintenance_reason use the following command.

$ ironic node-set-maintenance $NODE_UUID off

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