Bare Metal Service User Guide

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal (as opposed to virtual) machines. It may be used independently or as part of an OpenStack Cloud, and integrates with the OpenStack Identity (keystone), Compute (nova), Network (neutron), Image (glance) and Object (swift) services.

When the Bare Metal service is appropriately configured with the Compute and Network services, it is possible to provision both virtual and physical machines through the Compute service’s API. However, the set of instance actions is limited, arising from the different characteristics of physical servers and switch hardware. For example, live migration can not be performed on a bare metal instance.

The community maintains reference drivers that leverage open-source technologies (eg. PXE and IPMI) to cover a wide range of hardware. Ironic’s pluggable driver architecture also allows hardware vendors to write and contribute drivers that may improve performance or add functionality not provided by the community drivers.

• Understanding Bare Metal service
  • Why Provision Bare Metal
  • Conceptual Architecture
  • Key Technologies for Bare Metal Hosting
  • Understanding Bare Metal Deployment
• Bare Metal State Machine
  • State Machine Diagram
  • Enrollment and Preparation
  • Deploy and Undeploy
  • Rescue
• Creating instance images
  • Supported Disk Image Formats
  • disk-image-builder
  • Virtual machine
• Deploying with Bare Metal service
  • Allocations
  • Populating instance information
  • Attaching virtual interfaces
  • Deployment
  • Deploying with a config drive
  • Ramdisk booting