Hardware Inspection

Overview

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 by utilizing the ironic-inspector project.

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.

Capabilities discovery

This is an incomplete list of capabilities we want to discover during inspection. The exact support is driver-specific though, the most complete list is provided by the iLO Hardware Inspection Support.

secure_boot (true or false)

whether secure boot is supported for the node

boot_mode (bios or uefi)

the boot mode the node is using

cpu_vt (true or false)

whether the CPU virtualization is enabled

cpu_aes (true or false)

whether the AES CPU extensions are enabled

max_raid_level (integer, 0-10)

maximum RAID level supported by the node

pci_gpu_devices (non-negative integer)

number of GPU devices on the node

The operator can specify these capabilities in nova flavor for node to be selected for scheduling:

nova flavor-key my-baremetal-flavor set capabilities:pci_gpu_devices="> 0"

nova flavor-key my-baremetal-flavor set capabilities:secure_boot="true"

Please see a specific driver page for the exact list of capabilities this driver can discover.

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-band inspection is using the ironic-inspector project.

Currently it is supported by the following generic drivers:

pxe_ipmitool
pxe_ipminative
pxe_ssh
agent_ipmitool
agent_ipminative
agent_ssh
fake_inspector

It is also the default inspection approach for the following vendor drivers:

pxe_drac
pxe_ucs
pxe_cimc
agent_ucs
agent_cimc

This feature needs to be explicitly enabled in the ironic configuration file 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 an older version 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.