In-Band Inspection

In-band inspection involves booting a ramdisk on the target node and fetching information directly from it. This process is more fragile and time-consuming than the out-of-band inspection, but it is not vendor-specific and works across a wide range of hardware.

In the 2023.2 “Bobcat” release series, Ironic received an experimental implementation of in-band inspection that does not require the separate ironic-inspector service.

Note

The implementation described in this document is not 100% compatible with the previous one (based on ironic-inspector). Check the documentation and the release notes for which features are currently available.

Use Inspector Support for production deployments of Ironic 2023.2 or earlier releases.

• Managed and unmanaged inspection
  • Managed inspection
  • Unmanaged inspection
• Inspection data
  • Plugin data
  • Data storage
• Inspection hooks
  • Configuring hooks
  • Default hooks
  • Optional hooks
• Node auto-discovery
  • Limitations
• PXE filter service
  • How it works?
  • Installation
  • Scale considerations
• Migrating from ironic-inspector
  • Understand the feature differences
  • Migration process

Configuration

In-band inspection is supported by all hardware types. The agent inspect interface has to be enabled to use it:

[DEFAULT]
enabled_inspect_interfaces = agent,no-inspect

You can make it the default if you want all nodes to use it automatically:

[DEFAULT]
default_inspect_interface = agent

Of course, you can configure it per node:

$ baremetal node set --inspect-interface agent <NODE>