UCS drivers

Overview

The UCS driver is targeted for UCS Manager managed Cisco UCS B/C series servers. The pxe_ucs, agent_ucs drivers enables you to take advantage of UCS Manager by using the python SDK.

pxe_ucs driver uses PXE/iSCSI (just like pxe_ipmitool driver) to deploy the image and uses UCS to do all management operations on the baremetal node (instead of using IPMI).

agent_ucs driver uses IPA ramdisk (just like agent_ipmitool and agent_ipminative drivers.) to deploy the image and uses UCS to do all management operations on the baremetal node (instead of using IPMI).

The UCS drivers can use the Ironic Inspector service for in-band inspection of equipment. For more information see the Ironic Inspector documentation.

Prerequisites

  • UcsSdk is a python package version of XML API sdk available to manage Cisco UCS Managed B/C-series servers.

    Install UcsSdk [1] module on the Ironic conductor node. Required version is 0.8.2.2:

    $ pip install "UcsSdk==0.8.2.2"

Tested Platforms

This driver works on Cisco UCS Manager Managed B/C-series servers. It has been tested with the following servers:

UCS Manager version: 2.2(1b), 2.2(3d).

  • UCS B22M, B200M3
  • UCS C220M3.

All the Cisco UCS B/C-series servers managed by UCSM 2.1 or later are supported by this driver.

Configuring and Enabling the driver

  1. Add pxe_ucs and/or agent_ucs to the list of enabled_drivers in /etc/ironic/ironic.conf. For example:

    enabled_drivers = pxe_ipmitool,pxe_ucs,agent_ucs

  2. Restart the Ironic conductor service:

    service ironic-conductor restart

Registering UCS node in Ironic

Nodes configured for UCS driver should have the driver property set to pxe_ucs/agent_ucs. The following configuration values are also required in driver_info:

  • ucs_address: IP address or hostname of the UCS Manager
  • ucs_username: UCS Manager login user name with administrator or
    server_profile privileges.
  • ucs_password: UCS Manager login password for the above UCS Manager user.
  • deploy_kernel: The Glance UUID of the deployment kernel.
  • deploy_ramdisk: The Glance UUID of the deployment ramdisk.
  • ucs_service_profile: Distinguished name(DN) of service_profile being enrolled.

The following sequence of commands can be used to enroll a UCS node.

Create Node:

ironic node-create -d <pxe_ucs/agent_ucs> -i ucs_address=<UCS Manager hostname/ip-address> -i ucs_username=<ucsm_username> -i ucs_password=<ucsm_password> -i ucs_service_profile=<serivce_profile_dn_being_enrolled> -i deploy_kernel=<glance_uuid_of_deploy_kernel> -i deploy_ramdisk=<glance_uuid_of_deploy_ramdisk> -p cpus=<number_of_cpus> -p memory_mb=<memory_size_in_MB> -p local_gb=<local_disk_size_in_GB> -p cpu_arch=<cpu_arch>

The above command ‘ironic node-create’ will return UUID of the node, which is the value of $NODE in the following command.

Associate port with the node created:

ironic port-create -n $NODE -a <MAC_address_of_Ucs_server's_NIC>