Bifrost is a set of Ansible playbooks that automates the task of deploying a base image onto a set of known hardware using ironic. It provides modular utility for one-off operating system deployment with as few operational requirements as reasonably possible.
This is split into roughly three steps:
Supported operating systems:
Installing bifrost on RHEL or CentOS requires a few extra pre-install steps.
The extras and optional yum repositories must be enabled to satisfy bifrost’s dependencies. To check:
sudo yum repolist | grep 'optional\|extras'
To add the repositories:
sudo yum repolist all | grep 'optional\|extras'
The output will look like this:
!rhui-REGION-rhel-server-debug-extras/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
rhui-REGION-rhel-server-debug-optional/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
rhui-REGION-rhel-server-extras/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
rhui-REGION-rhel-server-source-extras/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
rhui-REGION-rhel-server-source-optional/7Server/x86_64 Red H disabled
Use the names of the repositories (minus the version and architecture) to enable them:
sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional
sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-extras
The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository contains some of bifrost’s dependencies. To enable it, install the epel-release package as follows:
sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
The installation is split into two parts.
The first part is a bash script which lays the basic groundwork of installing Ansible itself.
Bifrost source code should be pulled directly from git first:
git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack/bifrost.git
cd bifrost
Edit ./playbooks/inventory/group_vars/* to match your environment. The localhost file is intended for steps executed upon the localhost, such as installation, or image generation. The baremetal file is geared for steps performed on baremetal nodes, such as enrollment, deployment, or any other custom playbooks that a user may bolt on to this toolkit.
The install process builds or modifies a disk image to deploy. The following two settings (which are mutually exclusive) allow you to choose if a partition image is used or an image is created with diskimage-builder:
create_image_via_dib: true
transform_boot_image: false
If you are running the installation behind a proxy, export the environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy so that Ansible will use these proxy settings.
The below script env-setup.sh will install ansible and all of bifrost’s dependencies. You can configure the ansible installation location by setting ANSIBLE_INSTALL_ROOT environment variable. The default value will be /opt/stack.
Note:
Only ansible installation location will be moved as part of the environment variable. The other components will continue to be cloned under /opt/stack
Then run:
bash ./scripts/env-setup.sh
source ${ANSIBLE_INSTALL_ROOT}/ansible/hacking/env-setup
cd playbooks
The second part is an Ansible playbook that installs and configures ironic in a stand-alone fashion.
The re-execution of the playbook will cause states to be re-asserted. If not already present, a number of software packages including MySQL and RabbitMQ will be installed on the host. Python code will be reinstalled regardless if it has changed, RabbitMQ user passwords will be reset, and services will be restarted.
Run:
If you have passwordless sudo enabled, run:
ansible-playbook -vvvv -i inventory/localhost install.yaml
Otherwise, add -K option to let Ansible prompting for the sudo password:
ansible-playbook -K -vvvv -i inventory/localhost install.yaml
With regard to testing, ironic’s node cleaning capability is disabled by default as it can be an unexpected surprise for a new user that their test node is unusable for however long it takes for the disks to be wiped.
If you wish to enable cleaning, you can achieve this by passing the option -e cleaning=true to the command line or executing the command below:
ansible-playbook -K -vvvv -i inventory/localhost install.yaml -e cleaning=true
After you have performed an installation, you can edit /etc/ironic/ironic.conf to enable or disable cleaning as desired, however it is highly encouraged to utilize cleaning in any production environment.
If you wish to utilize ironic’s CLI in no-auth mode, you must set two environment variables:
For your ease of use, env-vars can be sourced to allow the CLI to connect to a local ironic installation operating in noauth mode. Run e.g.:
source env-vars
ironic node-list
+------+------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
| UUID | Name | Instance UUID | Power State | Provisioning State | Maintenance |
+------+------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
+------+------+---------------+-------------+--------------------+-------------+
which should print an empty table if connection to Ironic works as expected.
The following requirements are installed during the Installation step above:
In order to enroll hardware, you will naturally need an inventory of your hardware. When utilizing the dynamic inventory module and accompanying roles the inventory can be supplied in one of three ways, all of which ultimately translate to JSON data that Ansible parses.
The original method is to utilize a CSV file. This format is covered below in the Legacy CSV File Format section. This has a number of limitations, but does allow a user to bulk load hardware from an inventory list with minimal data transformations.
The newer method is to utilize a JSON or YAML document which the inventory parser will convert and provide to Ansible.
In order to use, you will need to define the environment variable BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE to equal a file, which then allows you to execute Ansible utilizing the bifrost_inventory.py file as the data source.
The inventory/bifrost_inventory.py program additionally features a mode that allows a user to convert a CSV file to the JSON data format utilizing a --convertcsv command line setting when directly invoked.
Example:
export BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE=/tmp/baremetal.csv
inventory/bifrost_inventory.py --convertcsv >/tmp/baremetal.json
The JSON format closely resembles the data structure that ironic utilizes internally. The name, driver_info, nics, driver, and properties fields are directly mapped through to ironic. This means that the data contained within can vary from host to host, such as drivers and their parameters thus allowing a mixed hardware environment to be defined in a single file.
Example:
{
"testvm1": {
"uuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001",
"driver_info": {
"power": {
"ssh_port": 22,
"ssh_username": "ironic",
"ssh_virt_type": "virsh",
"ssh_address": "192.168.122.1",
"ssh_key_filename": "/home/ironic/.ssh/id_rsa"
}
},
"nics": [
{
"mac": "52:54:00:f9:32:f6"
}
],
"driver": "agent_ssh",
"ansible_ssh_host": "192.168.122.2",
"ipv4_address": "192.168.122.2",
"provisioning_ipv4_address": "10.0.0.9",
"properties": {
"cpu_arch": "x86_64",
"ram": "3072",
"disk_size": "10",
"cpus": "1"
},
"name": "testvm1"
}
}
The additional power of this format is easy configuration parameter injection, which could potentially allow a user to provision different operating system images onto different hardware chassis by defining the appropriate settings in an instance_info variable.
Examples utilizing JSON and YAML formatting, along host specific variable injection can be found in the playbooks/inventory/ folder.
The CSV file has the following columns:
Example definition:
00:11:22:33:44:55,root,undefined,192.168.122.1,1,8192,512,NA,NA,aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee,hostname_100,192.168.2.100,,,,agent_ipmitool,10.0.0.9
This file format is fairly flexible and can be easily modified although the enrollment and deployment playbooks utilize the model of a host per line model in order to process through the entire list, as well as reference the specific field items.
An example file can be found at: playbooks/inventory/baremetal.csv.example
Utilizing the dynamic inventory module, enrollment is as simple as setting the BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE environment variable to your inventory data source, and then executing the enrollment playbook.:
export BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE=/tmp/baremetal.json
ansible-playbook -vvvv -i inventory/bifrost_inventory.py enroll-dynamic.yaml
Note that enrollment is a one-time operation. The Ansible module does not synchronize data for existing nodes. You should use the ironic CLI to do this manually at the moment.
Additionally, it is important to note that the playbooks for enrollment are split into three separate playbooks based on the ipmi_bridging setting.
After the nodes are enrolled, they can be deployed upon. Bifrost is geared to utilize configuration drives to convey basic configuration information to the each host. This configuration information includes an SSH key to allow a user to login to the system.
To utilize the newer dynamic inventory based deployment:
export BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE=/tmp/baremetal.json
ansible-playbook -vvvv -i inventory/bifrost_inventory.py deploy-dynamic.yaml
Note:
Before running the above command, ensure that the value for `ssh_public_key_path` in
``./playbooks/inventory/group_vars/baremetal`` refers to a valid public key file,
or set the ssh_public_key_path option on the ansible-playbook command line by
setting the variable. Example: "-e ssh_public_key_path=~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"
If the hosts need to be re-deployed, the dynamic redeploy playbook may be used:
export BIFROST_INVENTORY_SOURCE=/tmp/baremetal.json
ansible-playbook -vvvv -i inventory/bifrost_inventory.py redeploy-dynamic.yaml
This playbook will undeploy the hosts, followed by a deployment, allowing a configurable timeout for the hosts to transition in each step.
A simple scripts/test-bifrost.sh script can be utilized to install pre-requisite software packages, Ansible, and then execute the test-bifrost-create-vm.yaml and test-bifrost.yaml playbooks in order to provide a single step testing mechanism.
playbooks/test-bifrost-create-vm.yaml creates one or more VMs for testing and saves out a baremetal.csv file which is used by playbooks/test-bifrost.yaml to execute the remaining roles. Two additional roles are invoked by this playbook which enables Ansible to connect to the new nodes by adding them to the inventory, and then logging into the remote machine via the user’s ssh host key. Once that has successfully occurred, additional roles will unprovision the host(s) and delete them from ironic.
Command:
scripts/test-bifrost.sh
Note:
Bifrost supports using virtual machines to emulate the hardware. All of the steps mentioned above are mostly the same.
It is assumed you have an SSH server running on the host machine. The agent_ssh driver, used by ironic with VM testing, will need to use SSH to control the virtual machines.
An SSH key is generated for the ironic user when testing. The ironic conductor will use this key to connect to the host machine and run virsh commands.
By default, Bifrost deploys a configuration drive which includes the user SSH public key, hostname, and the network configuration in the form of network_info.json that can be read/parsed by the glean utility. This allows for the deployment of Ubuntu, CentOS, or Fedora “tenants” on baremetal. This file format is not yet supported by Cloud-Init, however it is on track for inclusion in cloud-init 2.0.
By default, Bifrost utilizes a utility called simple-init which leverages the previously noted glean utility to apply network configuration. This means that by default, root file systems may not be automatically expanded to consume the entire disk, which may, or may not be desirable depending upon operational needs. This is dependent upon what base OS image you utilize, and if the support is included in that image or not. At present, the standard Ubuntu cloud image includes cloud-init which will grow the root partition, however the ubuntu-minimal image does not include cloud-init and thus will not automatically grow the root partition.
Due to the nature of the design, it would be relatively easy for a user to import automatic growth or reconfiguration steps either in the image to be deployed, or in post-deployment steps via custom Ansible playbooks.
Bifrost supports the ability for a user to build a custom IPA ramdisk utilizing the diskimage-builder element “ironic-agent”. In order to utilize this feature, the download_ipa setting must be set to false and the create_ipa_image must be set to “true”. By default, the install playbook will build a Debian jessie based IPA image, if a pre-existing IPA image is not present on disk. If you wish to explicitly set a specific release to be passed to diskimage-create, then the setting dib_os_release can be set in addition to dib_os_element.
If you wish to include an extra element into the IPA disk image, such as a custom hardware manager, you can pass the variable ipa_extra_dib_elements as a space-separated list of elements. This defaults to an empty string.
When setup in testing mode, bifrost configures ironic to utilize the agent_ssh driver to help facilitate the deployment of local test machines.
When not in testing mode, bifrost enables the following ironic drivers:
As the OneView driver requires configuration information to be populated in the ironic.conf configuration file that points to the OneView manager node as well as credentials, bifrost does not support installation and configuration of the driver.
Please reference the ironic OneView driver documentation at if you wish to update the configuration after installation in order to leverage bifrost for mass node deployment.
The OneView documentation can be found here.
Bifrost can be used with a python virtual environment. At present, this feature is experimental, so it’s disabled by default. If you would like to use a virtual environment, you’ll need to modify the install steps slightly. To set up the virtual environment and install ansible into it, run env-setup.sh as follows:
export VENV=/opt/stack/bifrost
./scripts/env-setup.sh
Then run the install playbook with the following arguments:
ansible-playbook -vvvv -i inventory/localhost install.yaml
This will install ironic and its dependencies into the virtual environment.